


Nitrogen Narcosis

by starsoverhead



Series: Rapture's Remains [2]
Category: BioShock, Iron Man (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012), X-Men (Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, F/M, Rapture, Self-Esteem Issues, mentions of human experimentation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-14 09:28:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/835366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsoverhead/pseuds/starsoverhead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As, between the stars, there are black holes that take in light and matter and leave only darkness, there was once a place beneath the waves that stripped away humanity and left only greed.  A place that gave epithets and discarded names like so much rubbish.</p><p>It was rightly forgotten and left behind to devour itself in an act of appropriate entropy.  Yet, like all mysteries of the past, hints remain.  Echoes.  Shadows.  Fossils.</p><p>After all, every dying monster leaves something behind.  Every behemoth’s corpse eventually shows its bones.</p><p>--</p><p>With an Alpha Series Big Daddy stepping out of the ocean on the New York shore, the question of Andrew Ryan's lost city can no longer go unanswered.  Tony Stark's past forces him to act, and SHIELD has their interests as well, but Rapture has a history of turning men into monsters.</p><p>--</p><p>This work will contain spoilers for most if not all of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe, including Iron Man 3, Bioshock 1, 2, and Minerva's Den, and X-Men 1, 2, 3 and maybe First Class.  Also, it will be taken strictly from movie canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Tags and characters will be edited and added on to as the story goes on. Right now, I'm not really sure how to peg this thing.
> 
> Great thanks to my friends who understand my insecurities and have helped me by beta reading without beta reading, as much sense as that doesn't make.
> 
> Now, on with the show.

There were two things that Tony Stark didn't want in his tower: Nick Fury, and a Hulk cage. Bruce had insisted upon the latter, but Tony had said a flat no to the first. After all, he was the specialist in armoured life support suits that could also put up one hell of a fight, so he had vetoed Fury and SHIELD and had the guy from the beach in the Hulk cage in his tower.

Steve had been the guy to get him there. The reasoning was simple enough. Steve, Tony liked well enough to have in his tower, in a few secrets (really, the guy was painfully honest and if he said he'd keep a secret, then he'd keep a secret - that wasn't even in question), and doing some heavy lifting in areas that couldn't admit a forklift. And the guy from the beach, well, it was either Steve or forklift.

As he paced his lab, eyes darting to the video display of the enclosure that he hadn't wanted to build in the first place, Tony had devoted a few minutes to wondering how Captain America felt about being a substitute for heavy machinery before deciding that the more important question was what to do with the guy in the cage.

The sunlight at the beach, the fluorescents in the tower; none of it illuminated a pretty picture. That suit was more banged-up than the loser of a demolition derby. He'd had scans done while Steve had been willing to hold him up - again, it was a choice of Steve or a chain hoist - and had spotted a few bite marks from a few sharks on the tanks. Jarvis was running a bite-mark match in the background, just to satisfy Tony's curiosity.

His 3D displays showed him rivets that had to be from the rivet gun their guy had carried up with him that had been rusted into uselessness from years of exposure, which explained why there were now parts that hadn't been repaired at all. Not a single weld after the initial construction, he saw. Just those rivets.

There were decades of materials all over him. Marine sealants held some pieces together. The sealants had to be from boats, having fallen off in a storm, sunk to the bottom, Tony thought. Patches of coloured metal dotted other places, obviously from air tanks that had suffered the same fate as the sealants. Yellow, red, blue, black, all on top of a brown-finished base that made him think of the ancient deep-diving suits that the Navy was only now getting around to replacing. And that fit the overall look of the suit in general, except for the patchwork on the tanks which threw off the whole menacing-steampunk thing as it added a dash of Grandma's country quilt.

Sea sponges and weathered nylon protruded from the largest, opaque, Cracker Barrel tanks, which immediately had Tony thinking that he'd done a hell of a job improvising filters - hell, improvising repairs in general - but the two others were filled with liquid and they didn't connect to the patched and spliced tubing that connected to the helmet. Necessary? If so, how had he refilled them during his obviously long walk?

All of Jarvis's sensors inside the cage said that the guy in the suit, what he could sense through the armor, was comatose. Even then, that was a best guess, but not too surprising. For years, Tony had had a weapon of mass destruction jammed into his chest to generate a protective magnetic field that would keep a fragment of shrapnel from jabbing into his heart and killing him. The fact that it had powered another weapon of mass destruction that he happened to fit inside and had constructed forty-three of was incidental. While he was inside the suit, vital signs were iffy from the outside, if they could be measured accurately by more commonplace equipment at all.

Luckily for everyone, he didn't have any commonplace equipment. He had rotating displays of their visitor, analyses running on what he could analyse without taking anything apart, and he had a terrible feeling that all of this was going to come down to another goddamn problem that Earth should've solved a long time ago (Hydra weapons, SHIELD - fucking Hydra weapons) but had gone under the radar.

Or sonar, in this case.

He had to chuckle at that. Submarine joke.

"Sir."

He'd been lost in his thoughts for long enough that Jarvis's voice actually startled him, making him catch his breath. "Christ, Jarvis, have a thought for my newly repaired heart. What is it?"

"You have a call, sir."

Tony sighed in exasperation. "I told you to hold my calls."

"Yes, sir," Jarvis answered smoothly, "and I have been, but this one, I believe you would make an exception for."

"Presumptuous damn computer, okay, who is it?"

"It is your colleague, sir. Charles Porter."

"Now that's a blast from the past." A blast without whom Jarvis wouldn't exist. Tony's brows raised. "I haven't heard from him in years, but that's still not a reason to interrupt--"

"Sir, he says he knows what you found on the beach."

He shrugged. "Everybody knows. It leaked onto the internet almost instantly thanks to a thousand camera phones, about eighty percent of which had my name on them," he said, waving it off.

"Sir, he says he knows what it's called, and its origin."

Tony's motion came to an abrupt halt. "Okay, that makes it worth an interruption. Let me take it in my office. And call somebody to come in here and keep an eye on Theta, here."

"No need, sir."

"Hey, just because he's comatose--"

"Captain Rogers has been sitting in the observation area for the past three hours, sir."

"...Ah. Well. That'll do." With a flick of his finger, he answered the phone, settling in for an interesting conversation.

\----

He'd lifted motorcycles. Jeeps. Picking this guy up hadn't been too different. Just limbs in places where something of that weight usually had struts or a frame. Holding him up for Tony to scan had been harder than just carrying him because he'd had to stand back so all sides could get scanned. Easier said than done. But at least the guy had had those handles on the back of his helmet - something that Steve had caught himself drawing as he'd sat there, watching through the glass.

A few times, his drawings had made him get up and take a walk. Not because he was stiff or because his eyes hurt. That didn't really happen to him anymore. There were other reasons. Reasons that made him nauseous despite his chemically-enhanced health.

An artist's eye was discerning. Not that Tony's computers weren't, but they hadn't been to art classes. They hadn't been trained to spot movement and how to capture it with a few careful lines, and they didn't have human instinct.

Tony would probably argue that, and Steve knew he might have a point, but Steve wasn't a computer scientist. He was an artist, an observer, and sometimes a weight lifter, but right now, it was art and intuition that were telling him things.

Those handles on the back of his helmet, for instance. Those could've been easily written off as practicality for getting the helmet off and on, and sure, that was probably part of the design, but Steve had noticed the platform beneath those tanks. That platform wasn't holding any of the weight that those tanks surely had. Those tanks were held on by joints directly to the back of the suit and the platform was mounted beneath it. It was meant for something else entirely.

Coupled with the handles on the back of the helmet, it made him think that Theta - he took Tony's word for what the symbol meant - had carried another person on his back. Static loads didn't need handles. No problem there. This guy was probably about as strong as he was, and carrying a person on his back that way? Not a problem. But nobody grown could comfortably hold on with their feet on that platform and hands on the handles. Not even him, when he'd been a hell of a lot smaller than he was now.

He'd had to take his first walk after his mind had happened onto that idea, not wanting to think about the possibilities that opened up. He'd found a Sprite in one of the common areas - Tony did tend to keep those stocked - and while soda didn't do much for him, it had at least settled his stomach to allow him to go back into the room and look again.

The lighting was that godawful fluorescent crap, but it still illuminated well enough for him to get to work. The bed was one Tony had had to improvise, without those tanks coming off. To Steve's eyes, the platform he'd put together out of wire racks looked rickety, but it was holding well enough. Probably not comfortable, but that suit probably wasn't comfortable in the first place.

His boots were short, only ankle high, and his suit, even laying down, tucked in at ankle and knee. His arms did similarly at the elbows. As he drew, looking at fabric bunches and shadows, he had to wonder what it was that kept it in the same shape even though he was laying down.

The more he looked at the suit, the more that feeling in his stomach grew. There were screws in places that couldn't have only been going through leather and metal. Tubes that led into places that had no mechanical parts. There was no way to take the damned thing off for things like-- Like calls of nature.

Without even realising, while he swiftly downed cold, carbonated liquid to ease his stomach, he started to pray. The tanks were bolted into flesh, he was sure. And the rest of it--

He'd went into his own change knowingly. He'd not realised just how much he'd change, but he went knowing that change would come but he'd come out still human. Would anyone go willingly into a change that they'd come out of in a suit that they couldn't take off? All right, maybe, if it was a case of something uncurable. He'd heard about iron lungs, but that was the case, this was torture and treatment at once. 

Beneath the nausea, there was anger. Who were these people? What were they thinking, treating people like this? He gave a weak laugh. That feeling of anger is probably why Doctor Banner hadn't come to take a look. Not that Steve blamed him, now that he thought about it. If he had a condition like Banner's, he wouldn't want to look at this, either.

But this was a person, he reminded himself. He'd seen human experimentation before. He'd taken people (taken Bucky, God, how that still ached) out of it. And everyone deserved someone to be beside their hospital bed, waiting for them to wake up.

He was resting his forehead in his hand, letting things settle in his mind, when he heard a footstep nearby.

"Stark?" He glanced to the side, sure it had to be either Tony or Pepper, and he wouldn't lay bets on Pepper coming anywhere in here while Tony had an unknown on the premises.

He was almost uncharacteristically still except for the nod of affirmation. "We're getting company, Cap. Old friend. Says he knows what's going on with this guy."

"Old friend as in actual friend or someone I should get my shield for?" Steve asked, remembering very vividly what Tony's idea of 'bringing the party' was.

"Actual friend," he assured. "Actually, old teacher. Learned a lot about computer programming from him while I was in college. Genius. Serious forerunner in the field of artificial intelligence. Name's Charles Porter." He turned to Steve, meeting his eyes. "You might recognise the name. He was one of Turing's codebreakers during the war. Just sent my private jet for him." Tony looked away, casual - the kind of casual that was a facade for deeper things, Steve knew. "Oh, and I got word from SHIELD that they're sending Clint."

"Do they figure you'll actually open the door for him?"

"If they do, then they figure right." Tony took a couple steps forward, looking at the figure in the enclosure. "Rather have him all up in my rafters than Fury right in front of me. Guy makes too many presumptions. So. Having fun looking in the fishbowl?"

Steve shook his head. "Not really."

"Yeah, me either. Deathwatch bites. C'mon, we'll leave Jarvis on duty, get some food - we've got time before Porter gets here."

The thought of food set off a quiet growl in his stomach and made him glance down at himself in exasperation. It took so little to remind him of how quickly he burned through calories. Exhaling, Steve looked at Theta, having to weigh newly-awakened hunger with keeping an eye on him. Only after reminding himself that he'd been introduced to Jarvis's capabilities did he stand, still with a little reluctance, and stretch a little, resigned to feeding his hyped-up metabolism. But for once, he had at least a slight ulterior motive.

Tony wasn't exactly being his normal self about this, and Steve didn't have to be a genius to see that. Tony Stark was mister mile-a-minute when it came to actions and thoughts. He always had something going on, always had plenty of distractions at hand, but now he was being way too sedate to be okay. His voice was too calm, too easy, and he was being too flippant about things like 'deathwatch'-- Or maybe not. Maybe that was just Tony, that joke, but the rest of it, he was still sure about.

He was even more sure when, as they ordered their food, Tony didn't change his mind twice and actually ordered without some sort of joke. Steve was, as ever, as polite as possible, paid and tipped well, and then sat across from Tony at a semi-private table. "So," he said, intentionally echoing Tony's earlier words, "having fun trying to work through whatever's in your head by yourself?"

"Not really."

Touche. Steve raised his brows expectantly, a fork full of noodles midway to his mouth, and as if on cue, Tony sighed. "It's weird, okay. What Porter told me. Kind of brought back some memories. And no offense Steve, we're not friends. We're coworkers--"

"I'm not asking you to bare your soul, Tony. I just know that you're not acting like you, and I need to know if that's going to make anything weird for figuring this stuff out," Steve interrupted.

"I'm pretty sure," Tony answered, looking up at him, "that nothing about this is going to be anything but weird."

That was a point that Steve certainly couldn't counter. He acquiesced with a nod.

"Besides, anything that comes to mind, if I tell you, then I'll have to repeat it later, and then it'll have to be repeated again, and then it'll be some really weird version of rehash-Tony's-history telephone and it'll come out worse than something in the Sun or the Weekly World News - too bad both of those went down before you came out of deep freeze. That would've been educational for you."

"You realise I know what a fictional tabloid is, don't you?" Steve answered. "They've been around longer than you have."

"Shows what you know," Tony said, gesturing with a breadstick. "The world started when I was born. Give me twenty minutes and I can come up with a working scientific theory that would speak to that fact and couldn't be wholly disproved. Matter of fact, I can do it in five."

"Subjective anthropic principle. Did it in twenty seconds. You buy dessert."

Stark's nose wrinkled. "You aren't any fun. --Hey, where'd you learn about that?"

Steve just smiled, but it wasn't a smile that lasted. "I wanted to ask, though. Is this seriously a death watch?"

For a moment, beyond the background sound of other people talking there in the restaurant, the clink of silverware, the general sounds of the city that leaked through the walls, there was almost silence. Tony's fork scraped the plate. It was all the answer that Steve needed.

"Why?"

"Why what? Why is it-- I mean, that's kind of obvious, but why is he... I don't know, you know what condition he's in the same as I do. He's just... He's slowly shutting down. There's something he's not getting, and not a single readout I'm getting can tell me what. It's slow. He's got... days, probably. Refrigeration at the bottom of the ocean is pretty good." Stark gave him a pointed look that he rolled his eyes at. "Nature's best preservative. So whatever it is, it's delayed by that, at the least."

"Just call me Capsicle and get it over with. It's been on your mind for five hours."

Tony's shoulders slumped. "...You really aren't any fun. I seriously just felt the fun leak out of me."

"That's too bad."

Both of them looked up at the new voice, instantly recognising the sandy-haired man that walked up, a thin, metal briefcase in one hand.

"Well, look what the hawk dragged in," Tony replied, tossing the new arrival a piece of garlic bread. It was snagged, one-handed, out of midair without so much as a hesitation. "Figured we'd only see you at the place with the thing."

Barton focused on Steve, asking with a certain quirk of eyebrow, "And he went to how many years of college to be able to say 'the place with the thing?'" He held the bread in his mouth, seating himself astride a chair that was quickly flipped around, back against the table.

"Wouldn't know. Never counted," Steve answered. "I figured you wouldn't blow your cover, hanging around us."

"Cover is already pretty well blown." Clint bit into the bread with a shrug. "High profile alien-shooting has a tendency to end up on YouTube."

"Can we not talk about the whole aliens thing, please, thank you," Tony muttered. "Anyway, I figured you'd end up at the tower, not just wandering in here and plopping down to eat my bread."

"You gave me the bread."

"That's beside the point."

Clint looked at him for a few long moments in contemplative silence before asking, "You were one of those kids who moved the croquet wickets, weren't you?"

Tony threw up his hands. "What is this? Steal Tony's Fun day? Worst holiday ever."

Barton smirked and took another bite of the bread. "Too bad it happens a few times a month, right?"

"Oh, like you--" He stopped and looked critically at Clint before continuing. "Okay, wait, maybe you do know. Anyway, what's the briefcase for?"

With his hand midway to grabbing a tomato, Clint answered, "Briefs."

Tony raised an eyebrow. "Boxer briefs or tighty whities?"

"Don't you wish you knew," came the answer with a suggestive waggle of an eyebrow.

"Don't tell Pepper, she'll get ideas. --Aww, look, Steve's turning purple." Tony grinned over at him. "Too much underwear talk?"

Steve rolled his eyes. "Can we just finish eating and get to the real problem at hand?"

"The problem we should talk about in a much less public venue," Clint agreed. "I'm going to go on--" He popped the tomato into his mouth. "And I'll see you two there." With utter ease, he stood, replaced the chair, and walked toward the door, lifting a hand in farewell.

"You owe me a tomato," Tony called after him.


	2. Chapter 2

The knot in her stomach was nearly alien to her after all this time. For years - decades - she had lived in a nearly idyllic haze. No perfect idyll, of course; her life wasn't meant for that. But in the end, she had spent most of her time in a rather luxurious home, taking care of children who needed someone to depend on.

She knew what it was to be dependable - a skill not taught by her mother but murmured to her by her father, a kind and forgiving presence always in her thoughts. Without him, she would be as lost as so many of the children she'd cared for. The least she had been able to do was offer her - their - guidance.

Those memories would always be with her. Those hellish years where she had fought to be herself. The knight in shining armour that she had fixed all her hopes upon. Who had given his life to see her safe.

That was what drove her to knock on the stately door of the headmistress's office, opening it just a crack to ask, "Ororo?"

The white-haired woman looked up from her desk and gave a warm smile of greeting until she saw the concern in her face. "What is it? Is something wrong?"

"Have you seen the news?"

Ororo turned to her computer and quickly opened a browser window to a news site. In a matter of minutes, she had seen and understood. Just over an hour later, two women were on a train to New York City as the headmistress of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters scheduled substitutes for a few classes.

\----

When Tony got back to his lab, knowing there was still at least an hour before the plane landed with Porter aboard (and someone else - a woman, his pilot had told him, but Porter hadn't used a duress word and the woman had looked as old as Porter, so Tony had said fine, maybe his old mentor had a girlfriend in his old age), he was stuck staring at his work table.

The biggest, reddest, most perfect beefsteak tomato he had ever seen was sitting there, taunting him by existing.

He hadn't really wanted a tomato.

Helpless with disbelief and overwhelmed with how the day had gone so far, Tony sat down and stared at it, chin resting on the surface of the table, knowing very well that he was very close to hysterical laughter.

A goddamned tomato.

He was going to get Barton for this.

Maybe after he decided whether he was going to laugh or cry.

He was pretty sure nobody he'd been in touch with today really meant to bring up things that had him constantly on the edge of one of his Jarvis-diagnosed anxiety attacks, but damned if he didn't feel like everything was closing in on him.

Tony dropped his head into his arms with a heavy exhale. His father had saved his life decades after his death, and sure, maybe he owed him, but now he was remembering things, all thanks to one phone call. He was remembering distantly hearing shouted rants about Andrew Ryan, hisses that at least he wasn't like that Ryan idiot, he wasn't deluded. He did real science, his father had yelled when he was in an uncharitable mood, and when Tony had goaded him into a particularly uncharitable mood, he would grumble about sending Tony to some city under the sea.

And that was what Porter had said. Andrew Ryan's city under the sea. Where things like the guy in the suit, things like Theta--

No, that wasn't being fair. Theta wasn't a thing. Somewhere under that suit, there was a human, but to imagine people, multiple people, being put into those suits, and that being seen as a good idea? It made his vision start to go blurry around the edges.

His hands scrubbed over his face. He was better than he had been. He was coming through all this able to breathe and, more importantly, able to sleep, but healing was always a process. Even if it was a long, slow, draggy, inefficient process that he tended to get frustrated at.

"Jarvis, how are my vitals?"

"Within normal limits, sir. Your heart rate is slightly elevated, but not yet concerning."

"You're good for my ego. Keep going with that."

"Shall I extoll your virtues further, sir?"

"All day, every day, until I get bored of it, which pretty much means for twenty minutes. Perk me up, Jarvis. Make me feel like how much money is in my bank account. --Wait, no." He pulled himself to sit up and promptly slumped back in his chair. As much as he enjoyed and needed his AI, right now, there was someone else he needed more. With his phone in one hand, Tony picked up the tomato, thumb running over the skin. "No, I'm gonna call Pepper."

"Yes, sir."

Pepper. He could make all sorts of ridiculous poetic allegories about her, but he knew just how well that would go over. The proverbial lead balloon would have nothing on him if he started going on about her being his shelter, his balm of Gilead, his oasis, but there was still a place in his heart that only she fit. And somehow, her answering the phone with, "Tony, I'm busy; what do you need?" was exactly what he needed to hear.

"Hey, gorgeous. Listen, I was wondering - about ten minutes or so, do you think you could come to my lab? Or I could come to your office. Point is, I wanna talk to you. Without a phone in the middle. Could we make that happen?"

"No. No, I have so many things I--" 

"Come on - please? Pepper, I try not to interrupt you too much. Just right now, I'd really like to talk to you."

She sighed and he smiled to hear her hesitation. "God, I can hear your kicked-puppy expression through the phone. Is it urgent?"

"No. But yeah. Kind of. I mean, it's... It's a thing--"

"Jarvis," Pepper said, and Tony felt his own eyebrow raise. "How is he?"

The AI's smooth voice answered, "He has done an admirable job staving off an anxiety attack, Miss Potts. His vital signs are normalising."

"Anxiety-- Okay, ten minutes."

"Amazing how that changes your mind."

"And I'll come down to you."

"You are the best."

"I'd better be."

She hung up and Tony closed his eyes, smiling absently and kicking his seat into spinning in a circle. It made him feel like he was seven, but sometimes that was a good thing. He'd done some of his best work spinning around in circles on the stools at McDonald's back in the day. But the thought of being seven - sometimes that was as far from a good thing as it could be. And just now, it was only reminding him of the problem at hand. The city under the ocean with human monsters inside.

He knew all about human monsters anymore. One he'd trusted. One he'd been ignorant of. One he'd turned his back on. He guessed he was lucky that only one of those had made more monsters.

He was at least sure that his father hadn't had anything to do with Ryan's tin can full of badness, but at the same time, this was the guy that helped make Captain America, the symbol of all that was good and right with the world (and really a prude, but that wasn't the point). Why hadn't his father done something about Ryan? Why hadn't he stopped him from what was obviously runaway delusion? He felt enough responsibility for the world to give them a superhero, but not enough to stop a zealot from making hell under the ocean?

Or maybe, he thought, he was pinning too much on a dead man.

With a muttered sigh, he turned the thought over and over through his mind, not really being able to stop it. He had promised to stop letting himself get carried away or obsessed, but really, did one day count as an obsession? He had a question to answer and it wasn't an open-ended question like 'how do I sleep without having nightmares.' This was more 'why did my father give up on the world in the face of of a psycho.'

The answer came quickly - as quickly as a glance at the monitors that showed Steve Rogers once more taking a seat in the holding area. 

The superhero his father had help make had died. Or so his father had surely thought. Their symbol of hope had gone down into an ocean full of ice. So why not let a madman kill himself and all of the people stupid enough to follow him? At least Ryan wasn't invading a foreign country, right? He was just putting a lot of people into a jamjar and shaking it around to see what would come out.

And right there, in a jamjar that he hated every time he looked at it, was an example of what Ryan's so-called genius had produced. A slowly dying ex-human in a suit he could never escape.

The click of Pepper's heels was a welcome sound. Some people needed blood pressure medicine. Apparently his came in the form of Christian Louboutin. He turned as she opened the door and she barely had a moment before Tony, still in his chair, pushed over to her to wrap his arms around her and rested his head against her stomach. "I need you to make me a couple promises."

"Tony..." Her hands came to rest on his shoulders, and then one lifted to stroke his hair. "Tell me what promises you're talking about first."

"I want you to promise me," he murmured, "that if I ever wander over that line between genius and insanity, that you keep me from doing something like that." He moved one arm, just enough to point at the display that showed Theta, motionless in the cage.

Gratitude welled in him when she quickly answered, "I promise. Now what's the other one?"

"The other one is that... I need you to be with me when I talk to Porter." She started to speak but Tony sat up, meeting her eyes and holding up one finger to interrupt. "I know you don't want to be involved in this, and I'm not going to ask you to be, but talking about all this is reminding me of some stuff my father used to talk about when he didn't think I was listening, and it's kind of freaking me out."

The look in her eyes was pure sympathy and hurt on his behalf - a vivid reminder of just how much he loved her. "Thus the anxiety attack?" she asked softly.

"Not an anxiety attack," he said, shaking his head. "Remember, Jarvis said I--"

"--did an admirable job staving it off, yes, I remember," she finished. "But you're missing something."

Tony's brows drew together immediately. "What?"

She leaned down, kissing the wrinkles at the bridge of his nose. "If you're involved, I'm involved. I'm glad you asked me, and yes, I'll be there."

His arms wrapped around her again and he kissed her, his heart in his throat with gratitude. "You? Are amazing."

"I have to be. I put up with you every day." With a gentle smile, she kissed his forehead again. "Now start at the beginning and tell me what you're remembering?"

\----

The bench wasn't comfortable but he could deal with a little discomfort, Steve thought as he settled himself for another shift of watching the containment cell. Deathwatch, Tony had called it, and he didn't doubt that Tony was right.

That only made it sadder. Who knew how long this man had been suffering, and now just to slowly fade away in a cell? It pulled at his heart, even over the simmering anger that someone could do this. Had it really been an attempt at recreating the serum? And did he really want to know the answer to that question?

He was just picking up his sketchbook when he heard a soft-soled footstep not too far away. Twice in one day - but then, it wasn't surprising. A part of him bitterly decided that it was just too much temptation to go see the sideshow, even if it wasn't meant to be on display anyway, but he sighed with just how uncharitable that thought was and looked up to see the one person he couldn't have bet on. "Doctor Banner," he greeted, brows raising. "I've got to admit that I didn't expect to see you here."

"Almost didn't come," he said with an expression somewhere between a smile and a wince - an expression Steve understood without even having to think. "I didn't think you'd be here. But I didn't think anybody would be here."

Steve's answer came with a shrug. "I didn't want him to be alone while he died."

That got Banner's attention. "He's dying?"

"Stark says so. Says his vital signs are slowly declining, and he can't pinpoint a reason. And I don't have a reason not to believe him." He stood up, taking the few steps between him and the glass (it probably wasn't glass, knowing Stark, but it was easier saying glass than whatever it really was) and put his hand on the surface. "Nobody should die alone, you know?"

There was a lot unsaid between the two of them, Steve knew. He and Banner hadn't really started out well, once he'd understood who Banner was, and what could happen if Banner wasn't very careful. And the way Stark had horsed around had gotten under his skin. To him, just then, that wasn't an acceptable risk. With everything that had come after, though, he came to understand the situation and, really, he felt like he had to make some things up to him, but now, he thought, wasn't the time. Now was time to puzzle out what this was right in front of them.

"Yeah, I know what you mean," Banner sighed. "I didn't want to get involved in this. This isn't really-- This is a huge risk. With the other guy and all, but depending on what we find..."

Steve thought he understood and if he said he didn't feel the same sometimes, he wouldn't be lying. He'd always wanted to be stronger when he was younger, but stronger didn't mean looking like this. Stronger had meant stronger. Normal. Like Bucky. Some would say it was an embarrassment of riches, but Steve saw the way he was looked at sometimes. This was mostly just an embarrassment. "Yeah," he murmured. "I get you. But, uh - you know, one of Stark's friends is coming. He says he knows about all this. Maybe you could stick around and listen. They could tell you, if nothing else. And Clint's going to be there. Apparently SHIELD knows something - big surprise there, right?"

Banner echoed his sarcasm with a stifled laugh. "They kind of define having fingers in all the pies, don't they?"

The smile they shared afterward did a great deal toward soothing Steve's worries.

\----

Porter looked over the tarmac with a bit of amazement as luggage was loaded into the car that waited for them.. He'd been in London. He'd been in Rapture. He thought he'd known luxury, but then Tony Stark had sent a private jet and the car there in front of him was a gleaming limousine. "It's a little odd," he murmured, reflexively extending his arm for the woman beside him.

"What is it you mean, Mister Porter?" Her hand settled in the crook of his arm. Not that many years ago, people would look at them with utter scorn, a black man and white woman walking together. Not much longer than that and people would've shot them both for it - him for touching a white woman, her for being German, even if she was a German Jew. At least in some ways, the world had gotten better.

"To feel this grim while faced with the lap of luxury," Porter answered slightly squinting into the sun. "I should be enjoying this, but I guess I've been reminded of too many things recently."

"That makes both of us. But that is no excuse to stand out in the heat when a perfectly good air conditioned vehicle is before us."

Charles looked down at her with an amused glint to his eyes - eyes that didn't see quite as well as they used to, but at least her face was still familiar. "Ever the voice of reason, Doctor. Let's go."

He gripped the head of his cane, his opposite elbow taken by her smaller, age-spotted hand, and walked the two of them over to the car with careful steps. He wasn't as young as he used to be, by far, but he still had enough in him that he needed to do this. He needed to make sure that this door to the past was closed as solidly as it could be. It was only unnerving that his mental image of that closed door read "Securis" across the top.

Driving into the city was an experience he would remember for the rest of his days, no matter how many or how few they were. He knew he was completely living up to the image of a tourist, but he couldn't stop looking out the window, up to the peaks of the skyscrapers. Out of everywhere he'd lived, none of them were like New York. Or perhaps, he thought with a smile, it was that nowhere was like New York.

His smile turned wry as he saw the monument to ego that his once-student had built, with his name plainly on the side. "A little familiar, isn't it?" he murmured, glancing toward his companion.

She answered with bitter amusement. "Let us not draw more parallels than we must."

"Agreed," Porter chuckled and, as the door was opened for them, stepped out, hand offered for her to follow.

The streets were noisier by far than they had been inside the limo's cabin and he shook his head a little to see it. It was expected of someone his age, he guessed, but he really did prefer his peace and quiet. The traffic was loud enough that he nearly missed the driver's voice amongst the clamor. "Excuse me? I didn't hear you very well."

The driver smiled. "Is there anything you'll need in your luggage? We'll take it on to your hotel if there's not."

"Yes, actually. I have a bag I'll need--"

"And so will I," Doctor Tenenbaum interrupted. "Thank you, young man, for the reminder."

Everyone was still smiling when the limo drove away, both doctors carrying their smaller bags. Porter's was pulled close to his side. He almost felt like a traitor, having been so busy looking at the scenery that he'd forgotten about his precious cargo. His fingers, trembling ever so slightly as they always did anymore, found the outline of the case inside the bag. There it was, safe and secure, just how he'd hoped.

It barely took a nod to the receptionist before they were motioned to the elevator, which was all the better. This needed to be addressed sooner than later. Neither of them had said it but for years they'd been operating under a protective denial. If they pretended Rapture didn't exist, then it didn't exist. It wouldn't be a ticking time-bomb under the northern Atlantic waters, waiting to either be rediscovered or to explode and send its foul miasma through the world.

The arrival of this Big Daddy had been the shock they needed to jolt themselves out of that complacency. It was obvious that Rapture had to be addressed, even if that meant sending down a bomb to level the whole place.

When the elevator doors opened, Porter nearly laughed to himself. It was a lobby like almost any other. Maroon upholstered benches waited against each wall and there in the center stood a fountain trickling water over an abstract bronze sculpture that seemed to evoke absolutely nothing except for the generic business environment. Potted trees flanked endtables that were populated with surprisingly recent magazines - a reminder that this was Stark Industries, not a doctor's office. A room meant to be utterly ignored in favour of the business dealings that would go on behind closed doors. Over the years, he'd waited in more than a few rooms just like this.

"It's not much," a familiar voice broke in, "but in case you hadn't noticed, New York is kind of going through some remodeling lately, and our more interesting floors are part of the damage. So unfortunately, you guys get Business Neutral instead of Stark Hot Rod."

Porter smiled and stepped forward, his hand extended. "It's good to see you, Tony. And you, Miss Potts." He was taken into a quick one-armed hug, his hand clasped in one of Tony's, before he could offer that hand to the tall, red-haired woman who had walked in at Tony's side.

"Doctor Porter," she greeted. "I'm so glad to meet you. And may I ask...?"

"Oh, of course. Tony, Miss Potts, this is Doctor Brigid Tenenbaum - the woman who saved me from Rapture."

Both their eyebrows raised, but it was less surprise than appreciation.

"Doctor Tenenbaum," Tony echoed, taking her offered hand. "I've read about some of your work. It's an honour to meet you."

"My real work is not something that has been published," she said to them both, shaking their hands with a firmness that age couldn't steal. "But you will hear about that soon enough. You have found one of Rapture's Protectors, Mister Stark. And we are here to do what we should have done long ago: put an end to the damage Rapture can do, once and for all."

Tony, having to take a breath, nodded. Porter could see the stress in his eyes and gave him a reassuring nod. "Let's start with Theta," Tony said at last. "Then we can talk about Rapture. C'mon, we've got a room ready back here."

They were led to a conference room that was nowhere out of the ordinary, fitting in easily with the designation of Business Neutral. The only thing unusual in the room was the amazing view of the city out of a huge bank of windows, offering a heady tableau.

Theta, Porter thought. The designation wasn't familiar to him, but it made sense that more than one Alpha had survived. They seemed to be durable. Maybe moreso than their descendant series. Maybe a factor in his being put in cold storage instead of being bonded. The idea gave him a shudder, but soon he was placing his bag on the table before him to the sound of Tony's voice.

"Jarvis, could you call the rest down here? They've got stake in this, too."

"Others?" Tenenbaum asked, skeptical.

"Yeah," Tony said with that lightness that Porter knew very well was fake. "Some of my colleagues are going to come and listen in. Steve Rogers, you probably know of him as Captain America, Doctor Bruce Banner, and a representative from SHIELD named Clint Barton."

The tension that came to Tenenbaum's shoulders was subtle but Porter had gotten used to her moods years before. She hadn't been on the friendly side of Captain America for that particular World War. He didn't blame her for being on edge. It was time, he decided, for a distraction.

"Well, Tony, I see you still have Jarvis around."

"'Course," he answered with an easy smile. "How could I not? He's the best roommate ever. Doesn't eat all my food or use all the toilet paper and orders me pizza when I'm not feeling good."

"I wonder," Porter smiled, reaching into his bag and powering on a tablet. "Jarvis, do you remember an old friend of yours..."

Tony's eyes went wide and a smile started to spread across his face. "Seriously, you brought him? Thinker? Oh, man, this playdate is way overdue. Thinker! Buddy!"

"Hello, Doctor Stark." Thinker's voice was more digital than Jarvis's, but it was unmistakeable. "It is pleasant to hear from you again. It has been quite a while."

"It's been way too long. C'mon, Jarvis, say hello to your dad."

Smiling, glad his distraction worked, Porter glanced up to Miss Potts and saw her with a fond smile on her own face. "This explains so much," she chuckled.

The room was filled with discussion between the two AIs and a Tony Stark who seemed to be coming more into himself by the moment and Porter was glad of his own distraction. Tony had obviously needed the chance to unwind and he could guess why. He'd heard murmurings down in Rapture - murmurings that were distant memories now, echoes through the years - that Howard Stark had been one of those invited, but he'd never come. Wise man, Porter thought with a faint smile, but that invitation now, in the face of what had come up on shore - no wonder Tony was stressed. He could imagine the thoughts going through Tony's mind, most of them variations on, "There, but for the grace of God, go I."

Three more men wandered into the room, first one by himself, then the two others. There wasn't even a reason to wonder which one was Captain America. The representative from SHIELD - that one had to be the man with the briefcase. Which left the slightly worn-looking man as Doctor Bruce Banner. Tony clapped his hands. "Okay, I hate to interrupt the family reunion, but - introductions. We will go in order of seniority, so, gentlemen, this is Doctor Charles Milton Porter, genius, computer scientist, and programmer of the world's first truly sentient AI, who is also with us, named Thinker."

Porter nodded acknowledgement from where he sat. "A pleasure," he said. "And Thinker?"

"Of course, Doctor Porter." The digital voice spoke from the tablet sitting in front of him. "I am The Thinker, also known as the Rapture Operational Data Interpreter Network, first brought online in Rapture Central Computing."

"Predecessor of Jarvis," Tony put in. "And here is Doctor Brigid Tenenbaum, also a genius. Geneticist, if I remember correctly."

"Correct," she affirmed.

"I know that name," Steve interrupted, his voice quiet and strained. "And I know what they used to call you. Das Wunderkind of Auschwitz. You experimented on people alongside the Nazi scientists."

"Yes," she nodded, carefully steady. "That is a part of my past, and a part I am not proud of. My family was Jewish. While I was safe in the laboratories, they were killed. Leaving for Rapture after the war was the first choice I made for myself. But by your observation, I see you are Steven Rogers. Captain America."

Steve sat up straight, leveling a skeptical gaze on her. "I am. And I wonder just how close to Hydra you were."

"Things are kind of getting away from me here--"

Tenenbaum cut Stark off with deceptive calm. "That is classified. How is it that you have remained so young, sir?"

"Classified." His voice was frosty - moreso than Tony had ever heard it.

Stark cleared his throat, breaking the tension. "Oh-Kay! Now we all know that tall, broad, and handsome is Steve Rogers, Captain America, so I'll go on to my friend Bruce Banner, yet another genius, nuclear physicist and occasional physician on the side."

When Tony motioned to him, Bruce only nodded his acknowledgement, raising a hand in greeting.

"And over here is Clint Barton, sharpshooter extraordinaire, tomato prankster, and representative for SHIELD in all this. Apparently they know something about what's been going on here."

"Hey, guys," Clint said, as if the tomato hadn't been mentioned at all.

"Now we can get to business." Turning, Tony gestured at the windows that at once darkened and began displaying information. Images of Theta on the shore, videos from Youtube and from his own suit, the video feed from the Hulk cage (damn but he hated that thing), and the vital signs that the cage's sensors could pick up. "Doc Porter, you're the one who called me, so maybe you should start."

The older man nodded and pushed himself to stand. "Thinker. You have my records."

"Momentarily, sir," the tablet answered. A taskbox appeared and then Thinker and Jarvis were networked, data appearing alongside what Tony had called up with his cue. Images of a similar creation, the suit almost identical but for the lack of barnacles and the symbol on the glove. And then there was another, a different symbol, and more sorts of suits began to appear. One by one, each seemed more horrific than the last, and everyone watched in silence until files stopped opening.

"The truth is," Porter said, "that Doctor Tenenbaum is probably better for this than I am. But I'll start the story, and she can fill it in when I miss something. Is that all right?" He cast a look to the woman and she nodded easily, a pair of glasses now perched on her face.

"Perfectly so, Mister Porter."

"So, let's... start at the beginning. Andrew Ryan built Rapture, the city under the sea. He built it to be a place away from religious or government mandate - somewhere where there would be no imposed morality that stopped scientists from doing what they could, or stopped artists from creating whatever works of art they wanted. Not the best idea, but much like Communism, better in theory than in practice. It gave itself to lawlessness, but even with that, if it hadn't been for the discovery of ADAM, it's possible Rapture would've still existed even now." 

"...Okay, wait, is Andrew Ryan at the root of this, or some guy named Adam?" Stark asked, frowning.

Porter sent an apologetic glance to Doctor Tenenbaum, but she nodded and began speaking. "ADAM is not a man but a substance, Mister Stark," she began. "The discovery of ADAM was an accident. I found a man clutching his newly healed hands after he had been bit a certain sea slug - and I thought it was a miracle."

The windows displayed one image in particular - that of a sea slug that immediately had Tony and Steve frowning in recognition. "So these things are ADAM?" Rogers asked. "Because Theta had a whole net full of them."

"Yeah," Bruce said, "we've got a whole tank of them. We kind of figured that if it was so important that he dredged them up out of the sea with him, we'd better keep it in case he woke up."

"That will actually make this much easier," Tenenbaum said, finding herself surprisingly grateful. "These slugs are a natural source of unstable stem cells that are easily encouraged into taking whatever form someone wants. In the environment of Rapture, where there were no rules to govern what we could do, we encouraged it into quite a few forms. Some would use ADAM to change their features. Others would use it in the creation of such works as the Protectors, or Big Daddies, and of the Little Ones. Little Sisters, which were my creations."

"It was also synthesised," Porter broke in, "to create plasmids, gene tonics, and another substance called EVE, which plasmids required in order to work. But worse, as prices kept going up and up and people saw what ADAM could do, ADAM became more of a currency than anything else. That was why the Gatherers, or Little Sisters, were made."

The image that bloomed on the windows, then, was of a little girl, eight at the oldest, barefoot and wearing a smudged dress. Her skin was too pale to be healthy with a gray cast that would have made her appear dead, except she was obviously mid-wave to the camera, eyes glowing unnaturally even in the limited colour of the photograph.

Tenenbaum's expression was obviously pained as she looked at it, a hand pressed to her chest, over her heart. "It was, out of everything I have done, the most abhorrent. I used these little ones, these little girls, orphaned, to fulfill the needs of Rapture. They would go to the corpses and extract the ADAM so it could be reused. Our supply was always limited. But ADAM, like so many things at their first discovery, had a side effect we were unaware of." Stiffly, as if she'd been sitting too long, the elderly woman walked toward the picture, remembering when it had been taken. "Much how doctors and pharmasists once handed out heavy opiates to people, touting them as improvements to life, ADAM was also addictive. Withdrawal from it, however, caused terrible mutations within the body. Horrific growths, slackening of skin, loss of all resemblance to humanity, as poor Doctor Alexander found."

Tony frowned. "Doctor Alexander. ...Doctor Gilbert Alexander?"

She looked to Tony, lightly surprised. "You know the name?"

"My father did." He had seated himself beside Pepper and was now close enough to her that his shoe touched hers. A subtle tactile reminder that he wasn't alone. "Tried to recruit him, he said, but then he was one of the disappearances in the Vanishing."

"It is true," Tenenbaum nodded. "He was young when he came to Rapture, but promising. And he is one of the ones who helped make the Protectors - specifically the Alpha series - what they were."

Three images, Thinker and Jarvis working in concord, filled the windows entirely. Stark looked them over, reading the symbols and declaring, "Delta, Sigma, and Theta. Only three?"

"There were many more than three, though we believe that after Sigma, the production slowed and shifted," Porter answered.

Steve sat up, looking from the windows to the old man. "How can you be sure?"

"Because," he said, his low voice coloured with sadness and certainty at once, "I was Subject Sigma. And I was awakened from cold storage, incomplete."

All eyes at the table, with only the exception of Doctor Tenenbaum, were focused on him. Slowly, he pulled his shirt back from his neck, taking it to one side until he showed a long, messy scar that started over his shoulder and lined down over his upper chest, disappearing under his shirt.

There was silence until Tony spoke, his voice rushed. "Okay, wow, that was a bombshell - does anyone want anything to drink? I say we take a five-- no, a ten minute break. Just let Jarvis know if you want me to pick anything up - I'll be back with 'em." And with that gout of words, he was out of the room with Pepper swiftly behind him, not saying a word and not offering apologies.


	3. Chapter 3

The room was nearly stifling in silence after the door closed behind Tony and Pepper. Barely anyone moved, too stunned to do so much as shift in their seats. Only Porter was in motion, readjusting his shirt to cover the scar he'd revealed. Bruce exhaled heavily, rubbing a hand over his face. Tony had told him about this, and it looked like it was his turn to make Stark's apologies. "Tony's been, uh. Having some problems recently," he said. "Nothing I'm really allowed to talk about, but enough that I can tell you he'll be back soon. Maybe not ten minutes soon, but soon enough."

Porter nodded, as did, it seemed, everyone else at the table, but it was Steve who spoke. "We all deal with it in different ways," he said. "We can wait, no problem. Maybe while he's gone, we can go into more of a history lesson about this Rapture place. I mean, it seems like Howard Stark knew about it, but the rest of us are a little out of our depth."

Bruce looked at him gratefully. Steve seemed to be good at that kind of thing - steering conversation where it should go without excluding anyone. "And since we were offered drinks, how about something nice and neutral like lemonade," Bruce suggested, "so we don't talk ourselves dry."

"Shall I add some light snacks, sir?" Jarvis's voice was gentle over their frazzled nerves and Bruce nodded.

"Probably not a bad idea. Thanks, Jarvis."

"Always glad to be of service, Doctor Banner."

Tenenbaum smiled to them all. "That is very thoughtful of you. Of all of you," she said, coming back to her seat. "But if you want to know the history of Rapture, we have to start with Andrew Ryan."

"I know a few things about him," Steve said, barely looking at Doctor Tenenbaum. "Big industrialist, right? Came from Russia. He's the one who burned down the forest."

"That's him," Porter nodded. "And it was the end of the war that broke him. The bomb."

In context, nothing more needed said. There were two survivors of the war, one who had looked up every detail of what he'd slept through, and the other two had learned it as a matter of history. "I can't say I blame him," Steve murmured. "I'd have been biting through nails to get to whoever thought that was a good idea."

"But the way in which he broke," Tenenbaum said, a finger raised to mark her point. "His response was to take his fortune and create a city at the bottom of the ocean. At the time, none of us could see how bad of an idea it was. We, the scientists, were far too fascinated with our work. We didn't look around us to see the storm that broiled while we labored at the eye."

"It was New Years Eve of 1958 that everything went to hell," Porter said quietly, somehow without venom. "Brigid, there, is right. We didn't see much of it. But Ryan... He became what he didn't want to be. When he saw things getting out of his control, he got together with Augustus Sinclair and had this sort of secret police formed. Anyone who started to hint toward not fully believing in Rapture? They got quietly pushed out of the picture and into Persephone. That's what happened to me. Better get that out there before Tony comes back."

"Wait a second." Barton shifted in his seat, arms bracing against the table. "So he... what... Time period-- Wait." Frowning, Clint did a little math before starting again. "Bolshevik revolution, right? He went through that, and World War Two, and then the New Deal; he was four-square against government intrusion, but he turned around and did exactly what he hated?"

"It is never tyranny," Tenenbaum nodded, "when you are the tyrant. But I am impressed that two of you are aware he was Russian."

Clint gave her something of a smile. "I'm aware of a lot of Russian stuff."

"You would be," Bruce chuckled in a light tease.

"Damn straight."

The undercurrent wasn't missed by either Tenenbaum or Porter, the two of them sharing a knowing glance before Porter continued. "Really, Rapture was something of a capitalist nightmare. Everything was for sale, and it became a struggle between the Haves and the Have Nots. Some of the Rapture citizens - the scientists, the doctors, the industrialists, the business owners - they had everything they could ask for, and everything was for sale. But on the other side, there were people living in abject squalor, barely able to feed themselves, and it came to a head on that New Year's Eve." He paused, exhaling slowly. "I don't remember it firsthand. I'd already been taken to Persephone as a traitor and they'd made me into Sigma."

"I remember, though." Brigid shook her head slowly. "I was in my lab that night, working to finish a plasmid when the war broke out."

Rogers looked at her with a raised eyebrow, bitterness in his voice when he asked, "War?"

She looked at him, serious. "Yes. A civil war between those loyal to Ryan, those who gathered under Frank Fontaine, and those who believed in Sofia Lamb."

"Those aren't names we've heard before," Clint interrupted. This wasn't his preferred role. Really, he wasn't good at diplomacy. He was an assassin. Sometimes a bodyguard. He shot things with arrows that exploded. Talking people into being civil and distracting from arguments wasn't really his thing, but Fury had been clear. For this, he was going to be the contact. Even when he'd asked why, the answers hadn't been satisfying - or, okay, not wholly satisfying. It was good to hear, aloud, that Fury trusted his instincts. But the other reason had been seniority.

At least it'd given him a chance to start what may yet be, he thought, a creative prank war between him and Tony Stark. They'd see whose genius won out in the end.

For now, though, he had a situation to defuse. The old lady and Cap weren't exactly being friendly, and weirdly enough, it had been Cap who started it. It wasn't really something he would've imagined of Steve Rogers, picking a verbal fight with an old lady. This was beyond her working alongside Nazi scientists. He could see that around Cap just as easily as he could see the pictures the two AIs (two - he was definitely going to remember that) were showing on the glass. He had to pin it to something he didn't know yet. Something in Captain America's past that hadn't been in files or had been in them and he hadn't read it. Because as far as he could tell, the old lady, Doctor Tenenbaum, was--

Not harmless. No, this woman had a steel spine, but Clint could tell that it was straining with all the weight she carried on her shoulders. She blamed herself for a lot of things, and he couldn't tell yet if she deserved it, but she was determined to make it right. That was around her like an aura. To be able to tell more, he'd need to hear more story, and that meant keeping the best looking ninety-seven year old man in the world from ripping a seriously-ninety-something-year-old woman to shreds by yelling at her. "Frank Fontaine?" he continued. "Sofia Lamb? Who are they?" Clint paused. "Or do I mean 'were?'"

"You mean 'were,'" Tenenbaum answered, and Barton thought he saw a little bit of gratitude in her eyes. He gave her a flick of a smile in return.

"This is going to be a long story, isn't it?"

"That will depend, young man, on how much you wish to know."

"Problem with that is that there's no way to know how much we'll need to know," Barton answered, keeping his voice gentle but serious. "We just got a huge guy in a diving suit walking out of the ocean. Think that's gonna happen again?"

Both Tenenbaum and Porter were quiet, looking at each other for moments that stretched, having a conversation in silence before an answer came. Brigid Tenenbaum met Clint Barton's eyes with apology in every plane of her face. "It is a possibility we cannot rule out."

\----

Tony sat in a chair that, in an odd, abstract part of his mind, the one that gave out quips like Shriners handed out candy at parades, he realised could be a lot more comfortable. Sure, it probably wasn't meant to be sat in this way, with him folded practically in half, fingers laced at the back of his neck, but really, it was starting to cut into the backs of his thighs. He was going to have all these chairs donated to someplace that needed really nice chairs and probably would never have this problem with a chair leaving an uncomfortable--

Oh, right.

"Pepper, d'you think you could reach down here and pull that handle that makes the chair go lower? --God, yes, right there, thanks, that's-- my thighs thank you."

Yeah, he decided. He'd still buy some chairs to donate. Just to go through with his promise to himself.

The touch of Pepper's hand on his back took his thoughts all the way to that night in the house in Malibu where he'd asked her how small her hands were. When she'd fished the wire and the magnet out of his chest. The first time he'd really realised that all he had was her. And she was still here. She was crouching right there beside him in those heels and he had no idea how she did it. Both crouch in those heels without losing her balance and put up with his stubborn, obsessive, damaged self.

He was getting better. This, he reminded himself, was learning to crawl when he'd spent way too much time sprinting through life like an idiot. Crawling left him too much time to think about this stuff. Unless that was just what he needed to do.

There were way too many questions that he could keep thinking about in exactly that vein if he let himself. And all of them, just now, were distractions.

"Thank you," he said after a few heartbeats, reminding himself to breathe as he slowly managed to sit up again.

That smile of hers. Yeah, that was part of his blood pressure regimen, too, he realised. "You're welcome," she answered, and moved her hand from his back to his forehead. "Do you want to--"

"No." He interrupted her cleanly. "No, I don't want to, but I think I need to."

She nodded and smoothly pulled over another chair so she could sit beside him, within reach, and oh did he reach. He took hold of her hand in both his, occupying restless fingers by letting them stroke hers.

"I've known Porter in there since I was in college. He wasn't a professor. He was an expert," Tony said softly. "And he was... He was this... paragon of inspiration. He worked under Turing. The Turing. The guy who made the test to judge AIs--"

"Which Jarvis breezes through on a regular basis," Pepper nodded.

"Exactly. But, see, when I made Jarvis, I knew he wasn't the first one. You heard Thinker in there."

"Mm." Another nod.

"What you might not know, Pepper? Is that Thinker is older than me." At her disbelief, he shook his head. "No, I'm serious. He told me when he brought Thinker online, and I mean-- Forties. The forties, Pepper. Charles Milton Porter made a fully sentient, fully knowledgeable, predictive AI on forties technology. The tech was huge, sure - took up an entire building, he told me. By the time I met Thinker, he was living on a mainframe that had been cobbled together out of a few decommissioned UNIVAC machines - they were these huge things that used to fill up rooms and Thinker's filled up most of Porter's basement. By the time I graduated, I'd built the computer he was living on, and I'd built Jarvis to follow in his footsteps. But none of that would've happened without that old man in there."

Tony took a deep breath, the image hitting his memory again and again, harder each time, but he breathed through it. He'd staved off one anxiety attack and he really didn't want to give in to a second one today. "Now it was bad enough," he managed, "when I connected him with this weird ocean city my father always-- He kind of turned it into the Stark-family version of the boogeyman when he was around. 'Keep your hands off that or I'll send you to the freaks under the sea,' you know?"

"Well that's not--"

He stopped her with a wave of his hand. "Believe me, I know. It's not. It's not a lot of things, but my father wasn't a lot of things, too, and a fantastic father is on that list of 'not.' But Theta comes walking up out of the ocean, and then Porter tells me that he's Sigma, and I see that scar..."

Tony shuddered and then Pepper's arms were around his shoulders and his were clutching her as if it was the freaking Titanic and she was on that door thing and damn it, he'd make both of them fit. She smelled so good and her even breathing gave him something to focus on, and her voice was even better.

"You said earlier that you were... worried," she said, choosing her words carefully, "that if you'd been in Rapture, you would've made it keep going."

He nodded.

"And when Mister Porter showed you his scars...?"

A leading question. One he had to answer, one where the words were right there, just waiting to come out. "When I saw those scars, I... I could see it, like it was right there in front of me. Me, sewing some guy into a suit like Theta's. Me, putting someone in that kind of hell. I mean, I'd already done it to myself; I had a nightlight in my chest, for fuck's sake, and I wear a metal suit every damn day." He took in a shuddering breath. "It made me realise that... that just like Loki was leading those alien bastards into this world, I could've been leading an army of Thetas out of the ocean."

"Oh, Tony..." Her arms tightened around him and her lips brushed his hair. Those irreverent few neurons fired off again and made him wonder if he was going to have a few little red tips on his hair, but even that ridiculous thought wasn't a bad one. It nearly made him smile. "Tony... I don't think you would."

"You don't?"

"No, I don't."

"Why? I mean, I-- I want ... I want to believe you? But I really--"

Her finger pressed gently over his lips, quieting him, and she smiled in that way that could make him feel better on the worst day of his life. It had already. "Because," she said, "you hate being handed things. And even if you had been in Rapture, I wouldn't have been. And how many times have you said that nobody could do my job?"

He stared at her. She moved her finger, smiled at him, and all he could do was stare. She was right. He couldn't have held himself together for this long without her. Without her and Happy and Rhodey. They were all completely necessary to keeping him whole, and even if he'd been in Rapture, there was no way there would've been someone like her, someone like any of them, there to keep him in one piece. He would've self-destructed, like that Andrew Ryan had, and it all would've come crumbling down.

The smile on his face was full of helpless love and he knew it. "If I get out of all this alive? I'm going to marry you. I'm going to marry you so hard your shoes fly off and your hair blows back like those Trojan vibrator commercials."

"Then you'll have to replace the shoes," she warned, "and get me a hair appointment."

"I will go to the shoe store-- No, I'll buy you the whole shoe store and a spa. The whole package. Sauna, massages, facials-- do they still do those seaweed wrap things?"

She laughed, and so did he, and he got a kiss on his forehead for his trouble. "Is that a real proposal?"

"If I live through this, we'll find out. C'mon, we better get back in there. They've probably eaten and drank half of Manhattan by now."

\----

What they had been delivered was not light. It was a stack of trays full of fruits, cheeses, meats, and varieties of bread and crackers. There was a huge container of lemonade, and the cups and glasses that had been provided weren't intended to be thrown away at the end of the meeting. These were champagne flutes and polite little porcelain saucers with forks that Bruce didn't want to check for hallmarks, just in case they were there.

"Someone," Bruce said as he picked up another blueberry, "needs to define 'light snack' to these people sometime."

"Probably my fault," Steve said, a sheepish look on his face. "I'm pretty sure Tony and Jarvis both know I eat enough to bog down a draft horse."

"Nah."

Everyone looked up as the door opened with a rattle. Tony stood there as if nothing had happened, Pepper smiling behind him. It was a relief, Porter realised. He hadn't wanted to be the cause of his student's nervous breakdown.

"That's all me," he finished on the way to the food trays. "I'm a nibbler, so a light snack generally means something I can wander past or keep in my hand while I do the million other things I'm famous for-- Ooh, blueberries." Tony snagged the one from Bruce's hand before popping it into his mouth. "Now I'd ask to get back to where we left off, but there's a little bit of a conundrum downstairs that I think a couple of our guests can answer. Namely: Were you guys expecting another member of the Golden Girls?"

With a point, he indicated the windows-turned-screens that shifted to display the visitors downstairs. An elegant woman stood there, her hair brilliant white though her skin was a warm brown, and beside her stood an older lady with hair that had defied grey despite her age. It was short and carefully tended and she stood with an inner strength.

Tenenbaum adjusted her glasses, leaning in, before her eyes went wide. "Ach, du lieber Himmel," she gasped, her hand falling from where she'd been holding her glasses in place. "Eleanor."

"Are you serious?" Porter asked, immediately looking in her direction. "That's her?"

"I am certain. I could never mistake those eyes."

"So," Tony continued, "I'm guessing that means we allow her upstairs?"

"Immediately," Tenenbaum nodded. "We will need her."

"You heard the lady, Jarvis."

It took only moments for the security feed to show the two women being shown to the elevator and just a bit longer for them to arrive at their floor, where Steve was already holding the door open for them. As they entered, both nodding their thanks to Steve, Tenenbaum approached them shakily - or, truly, approached only one. "Eleanor..."

"Hello, Mother Tenenbaum," she answered, and the two women embraced each other, tears in their eyes.

"I am so sorry," the older of the two murmured. "All I could do was send him for you--"

"And he freed me. Father came for me, and now I'll always have him with me. Thanks to you," Eleanor reassured, her voice soft and warm. "And he thanks you, too."

"Oh, dear girl... I do not deserve gratitude from either of you."

Awkward glances went through the rest of the room with the exception of Eleanor's younger escort. "Hello," she said warmly. "My name is Ororo Munroe. My friend, for those of you who don't know, is Eleanor Lamb. Thank you for letting us come and speak with you."

"Nice to meet you, ma'am," Steve greeted with a polite nod, his hand offered. "I'm Captain Steven Rogers. You probably recognise Tony Stark--"

"'Course she does. Everyone recognises me. Now stop trying to take over my job as host, Miss Manners." Tony flashed her a bright smile, stepping past Steve and leaving him with a disgruntled look on his face. "Introductions all over again. This time, we'll just go around the table, how's that - also, help yourself to the snacks."

As introductions were made once more, Brigid Tenenbaum could barely believe who was there before her. She knew that many of the Little Ones had survived, but with how she had had to take herself quickly to Minerva's Den, leaving Delta alone with only Sinclair for guidance, she had feared the worst - especially when she'd had no further word. Her old bones ached and, not for the first time, she cursed them as she had to take her seat. But Eleanor wandered, pacing near the windows and stopping in front of the image of Delta.

The love was visible even now. Even after so long. She reached out to touch the glass pane, tracing the shape of his viewport on the surface. "It's life size," she said, "but you look so much smaller now. I suppose I just grew up."

"You..." Bruce interrupted, everyone else quiet to listen. "You were one of the girls?"

Eleanor turned to him with an easy smile. "I was, yes. I was bonded to Subject Delta. We were the first successful pair. In my heart, he was always my father. And a knight in shining armour at the same time. It wasn't the same for all of the other Little Sisters, but for those of us who were bonded to the Alpha Series... I don't know if it would be possible to love anyone as much as we loved our Daddies." She lifted a hand, interrupting a few voices ready to speak. "But you need help with Theta. That's what Ororo and I are here for."

"So, you know, too?" Steve asked, looking over at the other newcomer and receiving a nod for his question.

"I know what Eleanor has told us and I know it isn't everything, but she's told me what I'll need to do to help Theta, and I've agreed."

Tony's brows were lowered. "How did you know his name?" he asked, suspicion colouring his voice.

"I can identify Greek letters, Mister Stark." Amused, Ororo smiled at him and he rolled his eyes.

"Right, that. Okay, then, what are we doing to help him, since we don't have any others of these guys walking up on beaches yet?"

Eleanor finally took a seat, though her eyes kept shifting to the images. "There are two steps we'll have to undertake. One has been practiced before, with both my father, and--"

Her eyes shifted over to Porter and she gave him a small smile. "And Subject Sigma. Doctor Porter. I'm glad you were freed." Her gaze shifted back to the rest of the room. "But the other has never been done. I know how, thanks to my mother, but for obvious reasons, I've never tried to do it. To stabilise him, we'll have to bond him to a substitute Little Sister."

Porter was frowning by then. "The robotic Little Sisters never worked."

"No, they didn't," Eleanor agreed. "It takes a living being for the bond to work, and I can't be the one to do it. I'm still bonded to Father."

The pieces clicked together in minds all around the table.

"Wait, you agreed to--"

"Are you serious, you're--"

"We can't do that to someone--"

Through the cacophony, Ororo stood and lifted her hand, her chin lifted, and she cleared her throat in a way that silenced the room. "Eleanor and I," she said, "spoke about this on the way here. The bond will be one way. Theta will be bonded to me, but I will not be bonded to him. Then we'll have time to undo the bond so he can function normally. That is our goal. To restore him to his right mind with his body under his own control. It won't endanger anyone, and out of everyone here, I am the only candidate with a reasonable expectation of success because, out of all of us, I am the only unbonded person possessing the X-gene."

A pin could've dropped and the entire room could've heard it, some stunned, others confused. As ever, it was Stark who broke the silence with a murmured, "Holy shit, I get it. I get it. Bruce, you do, too, don't you?" His arm thrust across the table, pointing to his fellow genius and friend.

"I think so," he agreed. "It's ADAM, isn't it? You said it was unstable stem cells, right? And it shaped the genetic code of the people who used it--"

"So it was a kind of artificially created X-gene," Tony concluded, shoving himself to stand up. "All these things you talked about, the -- what was it, tonics?"

"Gene tonics. And plasmids," Porter put in.

"Yes, that! Artificial X-genes!" With a wide swing of his arm, he set his chair spinning and kicked a pane of glass with a hollow thud. "Christ, what is it with these stone age scientists sending us to school time and time again, fuck, and that thing that Magnet-head tried to pull at the statue a few years ago-- Fuck, I bet he'd love to get his hands on-- Oh hell no."

Tony's mood changed as quickly as the realisation struck.

"Oh fucking hell no, now it's not just these guys walking up on shore we have to worry about. Now we've got to make sure this stuff doesn't get out. I just tried to deal with this crap, this Extremis stuff, and now remembering what that guy pulled? No, we've got to make sure this doesn't get any farther than this room ever again. ...Okay, far enough to save Theta, but no farther, even if that means I build a deep diving suit or two and we take Rapture down."

Steve took in a deep breath. "I never thought I'd say this, but I'm with Stark. I saw what was happening with this kind of science during the war. I'm not going to let it happen again."

"But guys." Bruce leaned forward, arms on the table. Guys, look at what this could do if we did it right. I'm not talking about Extremis, Tony, or anything like what you've seen, Steve, but... Cures for genetic diseases? Therapies for people given to certain addictions by their genetics?"

"You were out of the country for the riots," Clint said, "but I wasn't. I remember the protests over the cure for the X-gene. Some things don't need curing, Bruce."

Banner met his eyes, a desperation in his own, but both men fell silent.

"As a survivor," Porter then began, giving everyone time to think before he spoke, "I have to admit that I'd like to see Rapture reduced to rubble. But I don't think an answer to the problem of ADAM is something that can come in one day. I've known about it for decades, and I'm still not sure. Right now, though, I think Eleanor and Ororo - I hope I said that right, miss - are right. There's a dying man down in that room, and he can be saved. Rapture has waited for forty years. It can wait a few more days."

A chorus of, "Agreed," drifted up from the table.

"I only have one question," Tony said, looking up and directly at his white-haired guest.

Brows raising, she nodded. It was probably a question about her mutation, she thought, or what her powers could do, and she'd answered that all before. "All right."

"How'd you do that throat-clearing thing? I mean, that was... that was just masterful."

Ororo smiled, gladly surprised. "That's easy enough," she said. "I'm a schoolteacher."

Tony smiled in return. "Figures."

\----

The labs hummed with activity. Eleanor Lamb, Brigid Tenenbaum, and Bruce Banner all worked over a few of the slugs from the tank that had been hastily set up for Theta's collection while Charles Porter guided Thinker on the new displays into showing formulae that hadn't been used in years.

The safe room, meanwhile, was being outfitted with numerous screens, all angled to be viewed from Theta's pallet. Tony was tightening a bolt while Steve worked at something he'd asked Eleanor about. Together, he and Clint worked at the latches of the helmet, each one encrusted in place from years of exposure. Clint was carefully wielding a blowtorch and wrench while Steve only used tools for grip. The diving weight he'd submerged with had already been set aside, giving them room to work the annoyingly small wingnuts that held the helmet seal in place.

"You sure about this, Cap?" Clint asked as he worked, tapping away at yet another wingnut, having only gotten three off so far.

"Eleanor said he would probably breathe more easily out of the helmet after all the patching he's had to do. There's no reason to make him struggle more if we can make it easier for him." To Steve, the answer was obvious. "We're going to take the drill off, too."

"Aren't you a little worried about what we'll find under here?"

Steve shook his head. "No. I know what we'll find."

"Now that's quite the claim," Tony said from where he was perched overhead. "Just how do you know, Golden Boy?"

"You heard the story same as I did." Steve leveled his eyes on Tony. "We're going to find a man who's gone through hell, physically and mentally and probably emotionally, too, all because somebody else put him through it. Anything else doesn't matter. He's still human in there. He still deserves to be treated humanely."

Staring at him, Tony shook his head before going back to work. "Why are you always so... good? You make me look bad."

Clint chuckled - and then laughed. "All right, got another one. Another nut closer to freedom, big guy," he said to the motionless figure. "Then you'll be surrounded by nuts. 'Least two of 'em."

"I heard that," Tony muttered. "But that reminds me, fellow nut. You never talked about what was in your briefcase in there."

"Yeah, never seemed like the right time."

"So talk about it now, while I'm temporarily emotionally stable."

"And that reminds me," said Steve. "What's wrong?"

"Anxiety attacks." He waved it away, gesturing with the wrench he held as if it was an extension of his arm. "Already improving, nothing for you to worry about. I want to hear what stake SHIELD's got in all this."

"Ah, I've got some coordinates and a few sonar images. Nothing concrete," Barton shrugged.

"Coordinates?" Steve glanced up from his work.

"Yeah. See, when they finally figured out where your plane went down, Cap, they went looking for it. Took a little less effort than finding the Titanic, but it still took some. Looks like they found Rapture on the way. None of it says Rapture, but when a guy comes walking up out of the ocean looking like he's been in there for a few lifetimes, putting an underwater city and this guy together as part of an equation just makes sense."

Steve shook his head as he broke another nut loose. "I don't know if I trust SHIELD being involved with this. After I found the Hydra weapons, I don't give them much credit for honesty." 

"If these things are still active down there, SHIELD has a job to do. This might not be flying graboids, but it's still a threat to the world," Clint reminded, leaving Steve more confused.

"Graboids?"

"Jarvis, add 'Tremors' to the list of movies Steve needs to watch."

"Yes, sir."

Rolling his eyes, Steve went back to his work. He'd put a brave face on it, but honestly, he was a little worried about what would be under the helmet. Whatever it was, though, he decided, it couldn't be as bad as the Red Skull. Or even if it was, at least this time he was prepared for it.

When the seal finally broke with a hiss and wisps of condensation, Steve rushed to grasp the helmet, not letting it fall too far. The hoses were still connected, and he didn't want it to leave a gigantic dent in Tony's floor. Tony already had one of those upstairs. From where he eased the helmet down, Steve's view was of helmet and floor and a puddle of seawater that had emptied as soon as the metal had come free.

It was Clint who got first view. "Jesus," he exhaled and stared.

Tony was more eloquent. "Okay, he's not going to win any beauty contests, but he's not as bad as I thought he'd be."

Theta just looked hurt to Steve. His skin was the same ashy colour that he'd seen on the images of the Little Sisters - where that skin colour was visible. More than anything else, Theta looked like a collection of old bruises, just without that undertone of flesh - black, brown, white, any of it. Instead, his skin was yellow, green, dark red-purple, blue. Steve had seen all of those shades before on his own skin, back when he was too tenacious to let a fight go and too small not to get beat to hell.

The skin was pulled tight where his flesh met the suit, and there he saw how Porter had gotten his scars. The metal seemed to have healed to the skin on the line of the helmet, down his chest and over his shoulders, his body practically shaped exactly to the suit with huge, bulging, veiny trapezius muscles that obscured his neck, but where metal and skin met, there were reddened patches that looked like painful. The seawater, Steve decided. The salt against his skin had to have irritated.

Atop his head was ungroomed, lank, and stringy black hair that had certainly seen better days. That would need to be washed and cut, Steve decided. All of him needed to be sponged off, but first, they'd tend with what they had. But then he noticed one thing he'd overlooked. "Hey," he said, glancing up to Tony and Clint. "He's breathing easier."

"Small victories," Tony shrugged. "I'll go get a washcloth. And maybe a first aid kit."

"Good idea. I'll go get a mop."

Soon, Steve was alone with him, stomach clenching in sympathy. He had to remind himself that this hadn't been done in an effort to replicate him. This wasn't another bad result of the super soldier serum. No, in a lot of ways, it was worse. He was still making up his mind what to think of Brigid Tenenbaum, but knowing her involvement in this made him not want to be in the same room with her. He could only hope, now, that something could be done. "You're going to be okay, Theta," he said, even knowing he likely wasn't heard. "You're somewhere safe now."

"His name is Dale."

In one move, he'd spun, fists raised, only to find Ororo standing there. With a wince, he dropped his head. "I'm sorry, Miss Munroe. You startled me."

She smiled, walking in further to pat his shoulder. "It's all right. I just thought you should know. Before he was Theta, his name was Dale Jesse Collins. And he was in the Army during the second World War."

"Well. It looks like the two of us have something in common, then," he answered, glancing back to where Theta rested. "How'd you ID him?"

"Eleanor knew."

"How does she know?" Steve looked back at her, wondering.

"It's a very long story, but it has to do with the ADAM we've all spoken of now. Her mother 'treated' her," she started, with little air quotes (Steve had learned what that meant pretty quickly) as she said 'treated,' "with ADAM while they were in Rapture, after having Delta kill himself in front of her. The entire story is heartbreaking, but by giving Eleanor all of the ADAM she could find, she also gave Eleanor all of the memories that the ADAM held. And that means that someone remembered who each of these men were, so now, Eleanor knows."

Shaking his head, Steve sank to sit on one of the benches that were built into the walls. "This Rapture place," he murmured. "I don't know if I want to go there if it can do this to people - make them think that doing this to other people is okay - but I know we need to go there to get it shut down for good. I still know what's right and wrong, even if I'm not used to the way the world works now, and letting this kind of knowledge out is wrong. People would use it for the wrong thing. All it takes is one person thinking they're more important than everybody else." Hitler. Schmidt. Loki. Now the remnants from Andrew Ryan.

Ororo's hand was gentle on Steve's shoulder as she sat near him, and she squeezed. "I know," she said. "There will always be someone blinded to everything but their way. That's why we fight, though. People like you, me, Mister Stark. Even Miss Potts fights in her way. We just have to keep going, and we can't let it harden the good in us. We have to prove that even in the face of adversity, humanity can keep being humane."

A small smile on his face, Steve looked over at her. "You're very wise, Miss Munroe."

"Call me Ororo," she replied, extending her hand.

He took it, giving it a careful but warm shake. "Then you can call me Steve."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the long delay between chapters. There was an injury in the family that took my time and attention, but now I'm back to writing, and I hope you enjoy. (:

"I don't like it."

"You don't have to like it."

Clint took a breath. The room was secure around them, stark in charcoal and brushed chrome without even a hint of a window. Exactly the type of room he was used to giving briefings in. Or perform an interrogation. A place to focus on the subject at hand instead of letting the mind wander, but today, that was exactly what his mind wanted. Today, the familiarity was grating. Irritating. Uncomfortable. His chair was uncomfortable. The table was too hard, too shiny. Fury's gaze was too intense. He shifted in his seat just enough to settle his crawling nerves. "You sent me in there for my opinion. This is my opinion. The tech isn't worth it, politically or socially. The risks are insane, not only for personnel but for reputation."

"But?"

Fury was focused on him and this time, Clint didn't like the feeling. The man trusted him. Had trusted him. He knew that Clint saw details that others missed, had insights that couldn't always be explained. He'd been tested for things like the X-gene, but had tested negative. He was just a human with a talent, but those talents and his gut feelings made him valuable.

Sometimes, he hated that. Like now. Being put over a barrel never felt great, but he'd seen exactly what this crazy shit could do. He'd seen the face of the man who had been so warped by it that he didn't even look human, and honestly, after seeing the Hulk, he felt worse for Theta. The Hulk reverted to Banner. What could Theta revert to? Porter looked normal enough, but he had a feeling there were some huge differences in history between that old man and the perma-suited guy in Stark Tower.

"But physically..." Clint exhaled. Talking about this almost felt like a betrayal to the people he'd spent the day talking to, but he only owed a few of them camaraderie. "The stuff that this ADAM can do? It'd be stupid not to have it in research somewhere that wasn't controlled by an objectivist dictator. But I'm warning you, if you get into this, you run the risk of losing Stark and Rogers."

"Thing is, Barton," Fury said, voice quiet and controlled and damn if Clint didn't know exactly what that meant, "we never had 'em. You said Stark's planning to go down to Rapture."

"Yes, sir."

"He knows you and he knows Romanoff. I want both of you on this. Bring back the research."

"Sir--"

"Listen to me, Barton."

Clint's jaw set but he met Fury's eye.

"If there are survivors of this place out there who know about this - if these few people survived, who knows who else did? Who else could already have their hands on this? If we have it here, we put it under lock and key, and we put it where the world can forget about it for good. Even at the bottom of the ocean, we can't guarantee that, but under SHIELD security, we can."

He bit his tongue. SHIELD security. Anymore, he wasn't so sure just what that meant. It was under SHIELD security that the Tesseract had brought Loki into the world. It was under SHIELD security that he'd had his mind warped and twisted into following a madman not far removed from Andrew Ryan, as far as he could tell. But Clint knew an order when he heard one. "Yes, sir," he answered, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

"Go brief Romanoff. Visit the armory. Get what you think you'll need. And come back with that research."

"Yes, sir."

Dismissed, Clint left the room and, instead of going for Nat, went to his own quarters. For a while, even just a little while, he needed to be alone. It wasn't the most comfortable room he'd ever been quartered in, that was for sure. The bed was more of a bunk, the decor just as dark as the room he'd just been in, but it had a window and, more importantly, a door that he could close behind him and not admit anyone unless he wanted to. Given the day he'd had so far, he didn't want to.

Tony Stark was having anxiety attacks. That was exactly what they needed in a man who was flying a WMD, but who knew just what he'd seen on the other side of that portal? Or what he'd seen on the other side of his heart stopping?

Rogers... Who knew about him? He treated it like it was just another war, and for him, it pretty much was. From one instance of Tesseract weapons to another, with an ice cube in the middle.

Banner was secluding himself from everyone by plunging into the research and treating it like science. Really, that was probably good for everyone. The more zen as he could be, the better. 

Natasha, if anything, had come out the other side like she always did. The woman was like an genuine katana: every time she got into the fire, she just came out stronger and sharper.

But him?

He'd been careful. Not many people knew. The anxiety attacks Stark was having? Clint kind of wished he could let himself go enough to have one. He still wisecracked, smirked, did his job like a good soldier. He slept when he could stand to, and he dreamed.

And fuck every single one of those dreams. A haze of blue and the wrenching nausea of being turned inside out, the fact that it had taken maybe one second and one little touch. Not even painful. Hell, if it'd hurt, he'd probably be coping better, he thought. If it had been a stab to his temple, like in the movies, or a needle in his arm, or even if the damned scepter had actually gone through his sternum and really touched his heart, and then healed the wound on the way out - at least then he'd have the excuse of really awesome special effects to justify the nightmares.

No, instead, he had a feeling like the touch of a fingernail right to the center of his chest, and then this easy kind of trust. He had memories of a man who was actually good to the people he recruited. Who was charismatic and intelligent and played to his followers' strengths. God damn, if only he'd been incompetent or short-tempered, then maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

Or maybe if he just didn't constantly remember that Loki's eyes had been unmistakeably blue when they'd been following him, and more aqua-green when he'd held an arrow ready to put through his head.

He held his head in his hands, squeezing his skin between heel and fingertips, trying to relieve some of the tension that lurked just inside his skull before ending up dunking his whole head under the faucet in his tiny private bathroom. Cold water sluiced through his hair and over his face, the sensation of running water seeming to take some of the anxiety with it down the drain. 

He'd had to leave when he realised just what bonding would mean, when they tested one of the screens, when they'd talked about mental conditioning. Not like Stark had left earlier. He didn't just take off. He'd at least had the courtesy to tell them he had an appointment with Fury, if they were done, and they'd excused him. He'd saved face.

Stark had said his anxiety attacks were getting better. "Lucky ass," Clint muttered under his breath. He could only hope that the nightmares would fade in time. How much longer could he do his work if they didn't?

A towel draped around his neck, he dropped heavily onto his bunk, eyes closing, head tipped back against the wall. It wasn't often that he ended up with a personal conflict against the job, and it was never an impediment to doing what he had to do. He knew what he'd been hired for. Rapture, though, sounded like a nightmare. Going down there to get the research felt like approving of it, and that was as far from his mindset as anything could be.

There was a knock at the door and with a wordless grumble, he sat up. "If you're not Natasha, leave me the hell alone."

"Good thing that's my name today," came the answer, door pushed open to admit her.

Clint rubbed at his forehead, trusting voice and footstep alike. Nobody was good enough to emulate both.

She dropped onto the bunk beside him with that kind of ease that said she trusted him - something he knew he trusted with only a few people. "Fury said we've got an assignment."

"Yeah," he answered through a sigh, bringing himself back around to business at hand. "Yeah, kind of, anyway. Y'know the news coverage of the guy walking up out of the ocean? New York?"

"And then you were sent off to Stark's tower with a lot of paperwork." She nodded, hair so slightly bobbing - enough that the motion caught his eye. What was it with this team and red-headed women? "Yeah, I know. Let me guess - connected to the underwater city?"

She knew. Of course she knew. Clint nodded. "Got it in one. Andrew Ryan's underwater city."

"Andrei Rianofski," Natasha echoed, the birth name rolling easily off of her tongue.

"Exactly. But the thing is, apparently some scientists in his city came up with this wonder slug goo called ADAM."

Catching her up to all he'd learned took longer than he'd thought it would, but soon enough, both of them were staring at the opposite wall. She knew why he'd had to leave when he did. Of course she did. She was a ball of Russian kick-ass with omniscience thrown in for good measure, and he'd swear to that in court. So when he asked, "What do we do?", he got the answer he thought he would.

"We follow orders." But then, she reached over to place a hand over his knee. "Until you get a feeling we shouldn't."

\----

She had only once seen Delta, her dear, beloved father, without his helmet, and that had been for mere moments before her mother had forced his hand to raise the pistol to his head and fire. He hadn't looked like Theta. He hadn't looked bruised from scalp to soles. His skin had been brown to ruddy, though still unnaturally so. He hadn't looked so bulging and veiny, his neck still defined, but his head had been utterly bereft of hair.

Eleanor couldn't help comparing the two of them as she stood there, looking at Theta through the window. Today had been his surgery, removing him from the suit that had denoted his role in life for so very long. Seeing him now, laying prone and bare except for a hospital gown, tubes leading from injection ports that couldn't be removed, made her want to rush in and protect him with all of the ADAM, all of the plasmids that were still in her blood.

It was almost alien to think of a Big Daddy as vulnerable. For so much of her life, even as he laid dead in the bowels of Rapture, Delta had been her knight protector. A loving figure in armour that shielded both of them, fearless in his fight to assure both their lives. She knew many of the Alphas were dangerous after losing their Sisters. Theta, though...

She remembered his files. She remembered what was said about him, and about his departure. And certainly he had caused problems. He had cost lives, but in Rapture, that was absolutely nothing unusual. In the end, deaths had become more mercy and more business than a true loss of life, though she wondered if anyone here and now would understand that without thinking her a sociopath - or was that even the word they still used? Theta had not just been one murderer among many, though. He had truly been a defender. He had wept after his Gatherer's death. He had left, presumably in madness, but he hadn't done as the other Alphas. He hadn't lost himself in suicidal rage. He had walked the oceans, bringing back ADAM slugs - and she could only imagine why.

The idea put a smile on her face. One that remained even as she heard footsteps approaching and glanced over to add politeness to the expression. "Hello, Miss Potts. I didn't expect to see you here."

"I didn't expect to come," Pepper admitted. 

It surprised Eleanor a bit to see her in casual clothing, but the sun had set long ago, almost exactly as Theta had been wheeled out of the operating room and into the safe room, as Tony called it, where he now rested. Sandals, shorts, a comfortable shirt - Pepper Potts looked as if she were at home, but with what had happened in Malibu, Eleanor supposed she was at home.

The older woman watched as Pepper walked over to the window, only glancing in once she'd stopped walking. Eleanor could see the reluctance and then the wince when Pepper saw him and her smile softened to sympathy.

"Is he-- Is he in a lot of pain?"

"No," Eleanor answered. "Right now, so long as he remains comatose, he's probably in the least pain he's been in for almost fifty years."

"But all those bruises..."

"They aren't bruises. That's the colour of his skin now." With a shake of her head, she explained, "It's the ADAM. After exposure to it, you become less and less human - it's only that you can't always predict how human you'll be when it finishes with you. Some, like me, are cured, or at least adjusted. But men like Mister Collins, there..." Her hand settled against the glass. "No one who went to Rapture came out the same, if they came out at all. The men who became Big Daddies - Protectors - had the worst of it."

There was bitterness in Pepper's smile. "Sounds familiar," she murmured.

"Does it?" Eleanor asked, honestly curious.

"From what I heard earlier, this ADAM isn't so different from Extremis. Or even the super soldier serum. But I only have experience with Extremis." She smiled again, bitter - with anger, Eleanor thought, beneath the smile. "Firsthand."

With just that one word, she understood. She placed a hand on Miss Potts' shoulder. "Are you well?"

The answering nod was almost imperceptible. "Now, yes, Thanks to Tony."

"Just as all of the Little Sisters were saved thanks to Mother Tenenbaum." 

"I guess so," Pepper agreed. "Tony... He only managed to save me, but the others who were dosed with Extremis... ADAM leaves people with wild, corrupted copies of the X-gene, so they mutate in unpredictable and detrimental ways. Extremis wasn't so... polite about it. With it, you just explode."

Eleanor caught her breath. "If I were religious, I'd cross myself. Thank heavens you weren't killed."

"I say the same thing every day," she murmured, once more looking through the window at the mass of tubes that draped from the barely-breathing form. "It's so strange. He's huge. He's made of more muscle than Steve and Thor put together - maybe not as big as Bruce's Other Guy - but he's... He looks like he could bench press an anvil without breaking a sweat, but with all those tubes and his skin coloured like bruises, all he manages to look is... vulnerable."

Eleanor gave her a faint smile. "My thoughts in your words," she exhaled. "The term 'Big Daddy' was a nickname. Their real name was 'Protector,' and that's how I still see them. Yet, with him like that, I want to protect him." She exhaled, and this time it was Pepper who put a soothing hand on the older woman's arm. 

"It seems like this may be a restless night for both of us. Maybe we could share a cup of tea and a pair of stories." She risked a smile. "In fact, there is one story I'd like to ask about - a new one. Just this evening." At last, there was a touch of humour in her tone, and Eleanor felt her mood lightening along with it.

"Oh, really? And what's that?"

Pepper pointed in toward Theta. "When the surgeon came out with him and was explaining what she had to do, did Tony really...?"

Eleanor laughed. "He stuck his fingers in his ears and pulled the entire la-la-la-can't-hear-you act. I've seen my students do it countless times, but that was the first time I've seen a grown man do the same."

"I know Tony," Pepper chuckled. "It won't be the last."

\----

Bruce had kept himself carefully and intentionally far away from the safe room. He didn't want to need it while it was in use, and after seeing the setup that they were going to have to use on Theta, he'd decided that in the lab, with some of these notes on ADAM as well as a few samples, would be better for him and probably better for New York. Tony showing up hadn't been unexpected, either. Neither of them really had a good personal history with restraints or watching people stuck in them, and both of them had a personal history with making science do what they wanted it to do.

Or what they thought they wanted it to do, anyway.

So ADAM was easier. They even had something of a homework assignment or two from Tenenbaum, which she'd explained easily enough. Apparently there was one certain plasmid that Theta would need when they went back to Rapture. "No matter how Jack, Delta, Eleanor, and I tried," she had said, true pain in her voice, "I know we did not rescue all of the little ones. Just as other Big Daddies likely still wander Rapture's rotting halls, surely the surviving Little Ones walk with them, now women, unaware of their change. They deserve freedom. And to free them, you will need this."

And eventually, Bruce would figure out when they'd all decided that was going to be the end product of all this. It had seemed to come from mutual consensus, almost from the moment they heard about it. All of them had decided it was necessary, and it only made sense for all of them to go at once. Most of them, anyway. There was no way Bruce was putting the Other Guy in a fishbowl a mile or two under the ocean. The fact that he was considering being on the ship up above was bad enough.

Bringing his mind back to the present, he turned to the project at hand. Neither genetics nor medicine was his practice, but he'd learned enough about his own physiology throughout his travels that working with ADAM wasn't much of a challenge, especially with such detail as Tenenbaum was able to give him. He had watched the three of them - Brigid Tenenbaum, Eleanor Lamb, and Thinker - work all night. "These are tonics," she'd told him. "Not plasmids. What I have asked you for is a plasmid, but many of the same methods are used. The difference is simple: a tonic changes the base genetics of the body. Once it is present, it can be rewritten, but it requires no attention to continue to thrive. A plasmid introduces the X-gene, pre-programmed into a certain ability. It will only function in the presence of EVE. Now, watch carefully, Doctor Banner. Tomorrow, I will be busy while you work."

The plasmid he was working on was one that Tenenbaum herself had created when she'd turned the corner from her lack of conscience. It was meant to break the bond between the Little Sisters and the ADAM slugs that had been implanted in their stomachs. To bring them back to being fully human. Theta, she'd said, would be the one to use it. He already had plasmids in his genes, so one more wouldn't harm him.

The ethical questions swam in his mind. He'd already seen Theta's condition, and to say he was reminded of the Other Guy was an understatement. If this stuff did that to a normal human, did he dare have hopes that it could fix him? Could he even quash the hope that ADAM had sparked? The fact that Theta had all that strength and power and even, according to the surviving Rapture citizens, rage, and could choose not to use it seemed like a gift from whatever gods existed. It meant that maybe, with a little work, he could turn his rage monster into a choice instead of a curse.

"Jarvis, bring up the Mark 38, please."

Bruce looked up from his self-appointed task to see what, exactly, Tony was going on about, and found him standing before one of his projection tables, pacing slowly around the perimeter. There floated two figures - one of Theta's suit and one of a suit that looked like Tony's usual, just bulkier and, for some reason, blue.

His hands were nimble as he picked and chose, tossing an arm component off the Stark-made suit and replacing it with the drill from Theta's, adding the tanks on the back, switching the stern faceplate for a viewport. "Thirty-eight?" Bruce asked idly, angling his glasses to get a clearer view.

"You'd know about this stuff if you'd listened," Tony chided without missing a beat in his customisation, plucking off the two opaque tanks and tossing their virtual images into a virtual trash can. "Thirty-eight was Igor. Good guy, kind of miss him, kind of wonder if I was having a flash to the... well, past, or future, depending on how you look at it. Integrate the two other tanks, Jarvis. --No, show a sliver-- Perfect. You read my mind."

"You've yet to equip me with the sensory equipment or the programming for that capability, sir."

"Give him time, Jarvis," Bruce chuckled. "How do you think the military is going to take you building a suit for this guy?"

"'Bout the same way they took him climbing up out of the ocean. They'll get over it. After all, they've got their own with Iron Patriot, and somebody around here has to be the Element of Generosity. Might as well be the guy with billions of dollars and tons of style, right?"

His brows nearly knit across his forehead. "The element of what?"

"Generosity, Banner, get with the program. I'm the Element of Generosity, Steve's the Element of Kindness, Clint's the Element of Laughter - Jarvis, make this part copper - Natasha's the Element of Loyalty, Thor's the Element of Honesty, and you, my friend, are the Element of Magic. Figured it all out last week after a series marathon-- wait, it's going to need those ports on his arm and his chest, right, and the ones on the hands."

"...You know, I'm not going to ask," Bruce decided, shaking his head and going back to his work, doing his best to ignore Tony humming some kind of chirpy song that he knew would stay in his head. It was better than thinking about just what Tenenbaum was busy doing while he was in here, doing something that would at least have some benefit to a few people. It still set him on edge, knowing what they had to do to Theta to save his life. When he looked at the man on the bed, he saw himself. He saw what the military would do to him, given the chance.

SHIELD was supposedly holding them at bay, and he believed it, but his belief was already worn thin from years of being chased. He was pretty sure that the majority of his grey hair came from exactly that stress. Would SHIELD hold them off from Theta, too? Or would Theta have to join him on the run? Bruce had the upper hand, there. He was at least mostly normal most of the time. He could blend in pretty well. Theta would stick out like a (literally) sore thumb. No amount of makeup, sunglasses, and Panama hats could make him look like a random person off the street.

Bruce couldn't hide a smile, but he managed to silence his laugh at the mental image of Theta in a Hawaiian shirt with a lei around his neck. No, that would never work. Someone would have to keep him safe if all of this worked out. Maybe that Xavier school that Ororo came from would work out. His smile softened into something more optimistic.

Hope was cruel. Hope mostly left people hurt worse than they had been to begin with, and he had intimate experience with exactly that. Bruce knew with every fiber of his being that with every moment that ticked past, his hope grew. He was setting himself up for a fall. But as he arranged the ADAM into the plasmid that Thinker was kindly displaying the formula for, he was remembering Betty, kneeling on him as he changed, unafraid, looking into his eyes and speaking to both of them - him, and the Other Guy. She was an amazing woman. ADAM gave him hope that he could actually go back to her someday.

\----

His eyes were open. Memories that felt ancient and rusty, as stiff as a corroded bolt, swam from recesses of his mind that he hadn't been aware of for decades. He remembered screens like this, though not exactly like this. In his thoughts, they were tubes, rounded and bulbous, instead of panels that were flat and practically transparent. Rapture had changed from what he had known.

Pain was coursing through him. He could feel every lurching beat of his heart, every rasping breath. The oxygen, pure and free of the tang of salt and fish, burned through his nose and into his lungs. There were restraints at his wrists and ankles. A strap across his shoulders, and another across his thighs. He tested them, found them firm, but though he was aware of the coolness of metal, he could also feel air.

Air. Dry, cool air brushing across his feet, his legs, his arms, his face in a soothing caress, even as it shot a seed of terror and rage through him. His suit. Where was his suit, who had removed him from his safe, protective suit, how would he ever get back to her now?!

One heavy push against his restraints and newer memories returned. His suit had been leaking. He had failed. In that moment, he wondered why he hadn't died. He should be dead!

Then the screens lit, and those memories resurfaced once again. This had happened before. He remembered the screens, the injections, the straps, the images, and he remembered that afterward, there was the girl who was the center of his world--

They were giving him another girl. Another. Who wanted him. Who he could take care of. And he wouldn't get it wrong this time, he wouldn't, he would do everything. Even if he would always miss her. His beautiful girl. He would always be sorry that he had failed her.

And then, with gloved hands sliding a red-tinted hypo into one of his ports, it began.

Hours passed. The images bored into his mind, assisted by tonic after tonic, his blood burning like magma. He screamed and bellowed, wanting what they gave but fighting against the pain. How could this hurt so much when it was everything that he had needed for so long? His fists clenched as he thrashed against the restraints - and then she was there, standing at his side, giving him her presence as the new conditioning took away the depth of one love and replaced it with another. She was older, she was taller, her skin was dark and her hair was white and she was breathtakingly beautiful and she was his daughter. His girl. The one he would move the stars for, the one he would kill or die for, the one he would do anything for, only to see her smile. She would never come to harm. He would not fail again.

With deep, warm content, his eyes closed and he slipped into sleep again. He heard an old, familiar voice say it was restorative before he was out, and he smiled, a low, happy groan escaping his throat. It was the second chance he had chased for decades, and now, finally, it was his.

\----

When his eyes opened again, he was aware that time had passed but he couldn't tell how much. It felt like years, but he knew that couldn't be true. He remembered pain and he remembered ocean, and that hadn't been so long ago, had it? He groaned, knowing that was the only sound his mangled throat could make, and somehow being aware of that was a new, odd knowledge.

"Theta?"

The word still felt like his name. He knew he had another name, but it was just out of his mental reach. Everything past oceans and a little girl in the halls of Rapture was enveloped in an opaque haze.

"Theta, can you look at me?"

When would his mind stop wandering? With a deep breath of air that actually smelled clear, he looked at the speaker and saw a woman. A coloured woman, with odd white hair, but he knew the feeling he had for her. He was tied to her, and that wasn't quite right. For it to be right, she would've had to be tiny, yellow-eyed, barefoot--

But she smiled. She smiled to meet his eyes and he felt himself smile in return. She liked him. And after so long, that settled something right deep inside him.

"Hello, Theta," she said and, with hands that were both strong and gentle, she started unbuckling all of the restraints that held him in place. "I think we can trust you without these now, can't we?"

He nodded and she smiled again. He'd do anything for that smile.

"You're probably a little confused right now," she went on, her voice warm and accented - very faintly accented, so faint it almost wasn't there. "We were able to bring you out of your conditioning, but your memories will be blurry for a while. They'll return, given time, and we'll do what we can to help you get them back."

His arms and legs were free, then his chest and his waist. He flexed his fingers, wiggled his toes, and sat up, careful of his own balance. The injection port on his chest was still there. He felt its faint tug as he moved, and the one in his arm twinged with the movement of his fingers. Some things, anyway, hadn't changed. He groaned, one of the few noises he could still make, and sighed.

"You've noticed I'm not exactly the girl you probably expected."

He nodded, meeting her gaze. It was easier to let her talk. She seemed to know what he'd need to know, and his mind was still whirling with uncertainties. Letting someone else fill his nearly-mandatory silence was so much simpler.

"The truth is, I'm only going to be bonded to you temporarily - as long as it takes before we can work out a way to break the bond safely. Without it costing your life." She placed her hand on his arm. "Until then, I'll stay nearby, and I'll be able to explain things to you as you need them. Right now, I get to tell you that you made it all the way to New York City," she said, "and it's the year 2013."

It hit him like a punch to the gut. The last he'd known, it was sometime in the fifties - exact numbers were still in that haze of lost memory. As if she understood, she squeezed his arm and gave him an encouraging smile. Whether it was his will or not, he would need their bond. He would need those explanations. He would need her help.

He placed his hand over hers with all the care he would use if she were four feet shorter, rumbling in a tone that, to him, meant gratitude. For decades, he'd found his footing in the shifting sands of the ocean floor. Now he would have to find his footing in the future.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to ask that people remember that Theta's opinions are that of a white man from the 50s. Give him a chance to catch up to modern thinking. (:

The day outside the windows was sunny, bland, and not her doing. The skyline was beautiful, but it had been better, she knew, before all the scaffolding had been in place. Reconstruction was going well enough, some buildings having to be completely rebuilt while others were shoring up walls and replacing windows. If the weather hadn't been cooperative, she decided, she would've done something about it. The city deserved a chance to repair and rebuild and though she'd not told them what her abilities were, she had a feeling that Stark knew, and if he knew, he'd inform the others. She wasn't intentionally hiding it from them. It just wasn't what she'd come to do.

Theta slept as often as he was awake. Tenenbaum assured them that it was natural. That it was right. That his body was healing from the low point that the prior bond had taken him to through the forty years of deprivation, and that it was a healing that ADAM couldn't rush.

Ororo still worried over him. He couldn't speak, couldn't yet hold his hands steady enough to write, but she could see there were so many questions behind his glowing yellow eyes, and they weren't ones she could guess at and try to answer. She didn't expect to have the answer to everything, but she'd hoped to offer more help than this. More than waiting between times of wakefulness and trying to guess what answers he wanted.

It had been nearly a week since her arrival, and she'd never expected to spend this long in the city. She had a school that she was responsible for, though she did trust her staff and, to a point, her students. She had demands on her time that went far beyond a job, and yet here she stood, in Stark Tower, glad that it was at least mostly repaired, with one person absolutely dependent on her presence. The school, for a while at least, would have to function without her.

She'd had to send for more clothing - both for herself and Eleanor - had spent time on video calls to approve lesson plans and syllabi, and had listened to plans being formed by people who had filtered a surprising distance away from each other.

Ororo frowned to think about it. She was used to being part of a cohesive group. Certainly a group with some internal disagreements - nothing was perfect - but they knew they were a group. Of all of the people who called themselves Avengers, or all she had met with Thor being back in Asgard, only Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff seemed to understand truly working together. They, however, worked for SHIELD. They had training the others didn't.

For a moment, she entertained the idea of inviting the Avengers into the Danger Room to teach them to work as a unit. More entertaining was the thought of their responses.

She turned away from the windows to look across the steel-and-white workroom - not quite a conference room, but certainly not equipped as a lab - at Eleanor who was, as was usual anymore, poring over papers. There were the sonar images from SHIELD, printouts from Thinker, all detailing the undersea sprawl of Rapture. It had surprised her at first, just how large Rapture was, and still made her wonder how it was possible that it had been built with the technology available past World War II, but then she remembered just how many voices often made themselves known within Eleanor's mind.

Even Eleanor didn't know all their names and she kept most of them distant, only consistently embracing the man she called her father - another man like Dale Collins, another Big Daddy, but one who had saved so many innocents at the cost of his own life. Ororo never wondered at Eleanor's mysterious smiles. All she had to do was remember that Eleanor had a true voice of unconditional love in her mind, and would have for the rest of her life. It kindled a streak of envy in Ororo, but it was a feeling she couldn't hold to. Her friend, perhaps even her mentor, deserved a reason to smile after what the world had visited upon her.

She sat at Eleanor's side, looking over the papers and offering her presence, and Eleanor took the cue to speak. "They've all but started packing for their trip under the ocean."

"Have you, though?"

Eleanor laughed and shook her head. "I don't doubt I could make it. I still have all the abilities of a Big Sister, but I put Rapture behind me. I'm not going to put myself back inside its walls."

"I don't blame you," Ororo answered, but idly picked up one of the pages there on the table. A photograph, it seemed. A skyline that looked very reminiscent of the one just outside the windows. "What are all these for, then?"

"Rapture has been out of contact with the world since the forties," she said, tapping a pencil against one of the pages - a close-up of a building with Fontaine Futuristics emblazoned in neon above what would be the front door if there hadn't been a shark swimming past. A stylised atom crowned the design, appealingly lopsided - intentionally imperfect, and very indicative of the era. "And it was very well-designed, but a lack of maintenance can destroy anything. Especially a lack of maintenance on top of several destructive incidents. Hephaestus was practically destroyed, many buildings fell, and then Mother attempted to slow Father when he came to my rescue. Adonis Luxury Resort, Siren Alley, Persephone, part of the Atlantic Express..." Each name she mentioned had an image that she pushed across the table. "All gone thanks to her. But the real problem is that it's been decades since any of us have seen Rapture. Doctor Porter and Mother Tenenbaum were the last to leave, and they left from Minerva's Den, which was always kept separate from the rest."

Leaning up from the largest sheet before her, she sighed and spread her hands over what had been, at one point, a basic overhead map of the city beneath the waves. Here and there, there were pencil marks, some having been erased and redrawn. None of it looked final. "With all of the earthquakes since then and the natural shifting of the ocean floor, as well as an uncertain amount of maintenance from what Big Daddies are left, and an unknown number of inhabitants to wreck it from the inside, I can only guess what parts of the city have been destroyed and what parts still function, but I'm the only person who knows all of the design schematics now." Eleanor tapped the pencil at her temple. "I can guess at the weak spots and attempt to edit a map. Theta will of course know the way, but with this map, at least the ones who go will have an idea of which doors not to cross into."

Ororo was impressed and terrified at once. There was so much in Eleanor's mind. So many other minds with all of these details that were still clear even after so long. "No wonder it's taken so much of your time," she murmured, looking over the chart.

"And it's nowhere near complete. It's only a starting point. I can't map every floor of every building that the party might need to go into. And that's why Mother Tenenbaum and I will be on the boat with Doctor Banner."

"So you won't go into Rapture - but you'll go above it?" she smiled.

Eleanor smiled in return. "I can't let them go without some sort of guidance. Mother Tenenbaum guided Jack, Father, and Doctor Porter, and she isn't as young as she was then. I'm not exactly young, myself, anymore, but all that I am was created in Rapture. I'm at least a part of their best hopes of getting through it alive."

And that, Ororo thought, brought them to the real question of the matter. "And what do you think," she began, "of this mission they've given themselves, anyway?"

"I don't think they have a cohesive mission yet," Eleanor snorted, amusement in her voice. "Some want to destroy, some want to take, some think it can be used in moderation."

"Which do you think?" The question, she knew, was thick with implications, and she couldn't - wouldn't - change that. She knew that she would have to make up her mind whether she would go if that question wasn't already answered for her. Theta was going, and there was no way to know if they could break the bond by the time SHIELD and Stark had funded both a boat and a bathysphere that would fit Rapture's airlocks.

"I can't condemn the use of ADAM," Eleanor continued, bringing her mind back to the question she'd asked. "Even with everything it's done - not only to me but to men like Father and Theta - and the horrors it's visited on people like Mother Tenenbaum, or the greed it sparked in Fontaine and Sinclair, I can't say it's unquestionably evil. Like alcohol or nicotine or opium, it's a substance that can be abused and is rife with that possibility. But it's full of the opportunity to be used positively as well. The difficulty is guessing whether the world would sooner use it for good or for bad, or if people would use it for what they thought was good and, in the end, was far from it."

The older woman sighed, looking up at Ororo with a mournful shake of her head. "I don't think that's something any of us can know. Rapture never discovered a plasmid to let us look into the future, and if they had, I wouldn't want it."

\----

Taking care of a little girl was easy. Bits of candy, strips of ribbon, a toy, a held hand. Defending from splicers had been a simple task, and one that barely required any thought at all. Now, his mind was full of too many thoughts that he had to come to terms with, a history that made him angry and wistful at once.

He'd seen the concern in his new bond's eyes once, when he had felt his own frustration bubbling inside him, threatening to turn into the red haze of rage that usually ended in someone's death. His hands had been wreathed in flames and then sparking with electricity - but she had put her own hands on his, unafraid, and the lightning had dissipated into the air, harming nothing.

But how could he take care of her? She was a woman. She was a coloured woman, not a little girl. She didn't gather. She wasn't threatened by splicers. In fact, there weren't splicers at all in this outside world - under a sky he barely knew that he'd seen during the past years. And they were going to break the bond between them, he'd been told.

What would his world be like without the bond? He knew that at some point, he hadn't been tied to someone else, but while some things had come clear, that part of his past was still dim. His name, he'd been told, was Dale Collins, but being called Theta still felt more true. Dale Collins may have been the man he was before his skin bubbled with muscle and strange colours, but now...

Now, he was Theta.

Now, even being freed from the conditioning, he had strictures that he felt better following. When someone with authority told him to follow, he followed. When they asked him to sit, he sat. He even sat still when the doctors needed samples. It wasn't painful anymore. The injection ports were clear and worked both ways. When he was awake, he waited patiently for the treatments that would, the small woman told him, rid him of the ADAM sickness. She didn't tell him that it would make him look like a human again, or give him back his voice, or steady the way his hands shook, but she said it would stop his pure requirement of ADAM. He took her word for it.

The lab he sat in for all the testing was brighter than the ones had been in Rapture, and he didn't look at it through a stained viewport. It was cleaner and more comfortable, even if he still sat on a barely-padded table that had restraints at the ready. There were no longer any tugs against his skin from the suit his flesh had grown to - there was no longer any suit, and he felt oddly light. He was still learning to control his strength and his movements without the weight to hold him back. And even without anything to fight, he missed his drill.

Yet, he had easily agreed to return to Rapture. He wasn't sure what they thought they were going to accomplish there, but they would need his help. He was the only one who was still strong enough to protect them inside Rapture's walls, who knew how the city functioned with its tunnels and maddened splicers. They would need him.

Each day, he was able to be awake longer and longer. He could feel his strength returning. And the day the small scientist woman pushed a glowing blue hypo into the port on his arm, he felt the old certainty flow through him with the fluid in his veins. His plasmids activated, coating his hands in each element he'd been spliced with, and he smiled.

"It has been requested, Theta," the woman told him, "that you show what you can do. Much like you did in Sinclair Solutions, do you remember?"

Sinclair Solutions. The demonstrations. The security bots and the audience and the displays. The memories came slowly, but he nodded with a rumble of agreement. He remembered.

"You will not have your suit, but you will be given a substitute for your drill, and of course you will have your plasmids. There will be a training drone, I am told, and you are free to destroy it. Now come, let us show them how strong you are."

The idea was satisfying. He had spent so long as an invalid, able only to sleep and recover, to be prodded by the doctors and treated for his dependence that the chance to show them all what he could do made a base pleasure warm him from the inside out.

When his bond arrived, he was standing, dressed in clothing he'd been given from a place they'd called Shield. He'd never heard of it. The clothing was black, from boots to neck, but it was good, durable, though the collar couldn't button into place around his ADAM-given musculature and the sleeves had to be rolled up for the sake of his plasmids and his injection port. There were more hypos on a band at his waist - nowhere near as convenient as his suit had been, but his suit no longer existed.

She smiled at him, though, and reached to take his hand. "Are you ready?" she asked, her voice warm and sincere, and he responded with a nod. He was ready. More than ready.

It seemed barely more than a blink before he was in a room that was so very reminiscent of the plasmids testing room. A wooden floor beneath him, bleachers to one side in place of the theatre chairs, and people seated there, waiting.

One of them seemed familiar. One touched a memory, though he was sure he'd not seen the man since waking up here in the tower. He put it out of his mind in favour of grasping the weapon they handed him. Not a drill but a long, heavy point of metal that braced on his forearm and extended as far as his drill had. Pointed, but a blunt point. He could still make it lethal, but he knew that wasn't intended. He had the mindfulness, now, to stop attacking when the time was right. Frost spread down the metal as he checked his grip, the other hand wreathed in flames.

"Theta," said the small scientist, and he met her eyes. Small but determined, strong inside much more than out. He remembered her from so long ago. Glimpses during testing. Her and some man, slant-eyed and always calling himself by his own name. She hadn't had that strength then. Rarely speaking, avoiding it when she could, and preferring having her head in something that couldn't talk back. The helmet descending over his head, her voice in the distance...

He narrowed his eyes, but then there was a hand on his arm. Her. His bond. The memories eased and with a small nod, he looked back to the frail woman who still had no fear despite where his thoughts had gone.

"Show them," she said instead. "Show them how well you will protect them in Rapture."

Then he stood alone on the hardwood and set the idea in his mind. He had to protect the people on the bleachers. His bond was there, and more than anything, he had to protect her.

With one, slow, certain, solemn nod, he faced the other door in the room and, with a gesture, placed a cyclone trap just inside it. There was no denying that the capability settled something inside him. For so long, he had missed the plasmids at his call, but now, he was himself again. He was what he'd become. What he was supposed to be.

The door opened, reeling upward in a mockery of a Securis model and immediately, Theta's attention was focused. It seemed like the world took on a red tint as he watched the opponent emerge with a whistle that sounded all too familiar. An imitation of the rotor-based security bots he'd known. His cyclone trap was useless, but that wouldn't deter him. He couldn't let it reach the bleachers. He couldn't let it reach his bond.

A sound of anger left his throat and he slung a quick strike with Electro Bolt, expecting to see it drop as the security bots always did, but there it remained, hanging in the air and orienting on him. The thing was shielded. With a low rumble, Theta smiled. It would be a fight worth fighting, then.

He charged. The heavy clang of his faux-drill against the machine's hull and it was sent careening away before it could return the favour. It tracked his movements, attacked with some sort of gun - but its ammunition wasn't lethal. His tonics prevented much of the damage and he thought nothing of it, keeping it on the defense with a burst of flame. The drone's metal skin became swiftly marked with fire char, electric scorches, and skins of ice that marred the works beneath while his own flesh was unharmed.

With a whirr and click, the drone's weaponry changed. There was a high whine, almost a buzz, then a burst of light, and Theta felt himself falling backward. His unarmed hand stretched below, a quick burst of telekinesis catching him and his feet fell heavy on the wood. There was nothing he could remember that fired and felt like that, but that was all the more reason to get rid of the damned thing.

Again, he charged, struck, but when his mock-drill impacted, he flexed his hand and coated the drone with Winter Blast's ice. It fell heavily and Theta struck again and again, his blows heavy and crushing against the drone until it laid bent and warped on the floor, twitching in its inability to fly.

Theta stepped away, looking at it with vision that slowly cleared from the red haze. The fight was finished, and he wasn't sure it had been a good demonstration, but he had defeated the drone, standing between it and the bleachers. There was a smattering of applause which he hadn't expected. But amongst the clapping, he heard a sound, the high-pitched whine of that impact weapon that had sent him flying.

His eyes narrowed, flaring red, and with all of Sports Boost's quickness, he spun, telekinetically grabbing the nearest item he could to hold between him and the drone. The bolt struck his barrier, ricocheting harmlessly away before Theta flung his makeshift cover at the drone's motionless form. With a ringing hum, it flew through the air and sliced the drone neatly in two before it bounced against the floor and started arcing back. He caught it in midair, the improvised weapon hanging there, held by the power of the plasmid, and he found himself staring.

Circular. A star in the center, painted red, white, and blue. The sight reached into his memories and dredged moments to the surface like the reluctant slugs he'd plucked from the ocean's floor. Posters, photos, newsreels. It had started with a different shield, but he remembered seeing this one before, on the arm of the man who sat in the bleachers--

He wasn't sitting anymore. Theta turned, shield still suspended, and faced him. Not quite as tall as he was, but the ADAM had changed his height a long time ago. Blonde. And with a cautious smile on his face.

"Mind if I take that back?" he asked, and once his hand was on it, Theta released his own hold. He knew this man, by reputation if nothing else. Theta smiled. He was meeting Captain America.

\----

"I'm glad that thing didn't take me very long to make," Tony muttered as he stood up from the bleachers and headed over to the smouldering wreckage of the drone he'd built.

Steve didn't follow. He, instead, was looking at Theta, who was looking at him like someone meeting their hero. He'd been told that Dale Collins had been in the Army during the war, but he'd also been told that Theta, the personality that had overwritten Dale Collins, would probably take a while to assimilate all of his old memories if he ever did.

Ororo came up beside them, placing a hand on each of their arms. "It seems like you recognise him," she said, and Steve reflexively shook his head. When Theta nodded, he realised his mistake. Judging by the squeeze to his arm, he was forgiven.

"How do you know him?" she asked. "Have you seen him while you've been here?"

A headshake.

"You remember him from before, then? Before Rapture?"

A nod.

"The Army?"

More nodding. And then, of all the strange things, the man he'd just watched wield fire, electricity, and ice as if they were nothing, with more muscles than the serum had given him, began to hum in a low, rough voice.

It took him a moment to realise what he heard, but then, he couldn't help a smile and laugh, a nod, and he started to hum as well, before half-singing the iconic words, "Star-spangled man with a plan."

Theta broke into a smile and Steve did as well. "I never thought I'd be glad to hear that song. Did you actually see the stage show?" Another nod and Steve grinned. "If I get roped into it again, how about you hold up another motorcycle with girls sitting on it?"

Holding up two fingers, Theta nodded, then extended his hand for a handshake. Steve gladly took it. It was good to have someone else around who remembered the world the way it used to be. Someone else who had been under the ocean, if not in the ice, for all these years. It wasn't a fate he'd wish on anyone, but at least now there was someone who knew.

"Okay," Tony broke in. "So now that Capsicle has had his share of attention, how about we pay attention to me for a second?"

Steve rolled his eyes but nodded in Stark's direction. "All right. What is it, Tony?"

"Theta's brilliant presentation," he said, "has affirmed to me that it's time to break this out in honour of his return to health. Since we took one suit away from him, I figured it was only fair that we give one back." With a flourish and a smile, Tony motioned for the door to lift again and, obediently, it did.

The metal gleamed dark slate and bronze, brand new and undented. It was reminiscent of his old suit, even down to the viewport in the helmet and the port access in the chest and arm, a drill on one side, the other glove open for plasmid use. It was large, imposing, and Steve could easily see how it suited Theta, even with the glowing circle like Stark's in the chest.

"So." Tony rocked back on his heels, looking up at Theta, and Steve was instantly put in mind of a student desperately wanting approval of the teacher. "Wanna try it on?"

Minutes later, Theta was stepping out into the room, his footfalls heavy, the viewport of the suit glowing contented yellow, and the drill hefted easily on his right hand.

Tony started circling him. "Got tanks on the back for the blue stuff and the red stuff, gauges on the arm here to tell the levels of both and the power level since I figured a HUD would be overkill. CO2 scrubbers built in, just like my suit, and it's strengthened for deep submersion. Little more durable than your old one, too, but I think we'll be able to get this one repairs more often. Not that your efforts were bad, but, c'mon, real welding. We can do this." Tony looked up at the helmet and smiled. "Whaddaya think?"

The drill revved, frost blossoming over the surface, and a similar glaze formed over the opposite hand before it formed into a thumbs-up.

"Fantastic." Stark to the rest of the room, arms spread wide. "A few tests, then a week 'til Rapture. Who's up for lobster? I'm buying."


End file.
